Читать книгу The Sweet Hills of Florence - Jan Wallace Dickinson - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

Florence 1941

The Day of the Dead

Mussolini did not feel the rain. Straining tall in the open tourer beside his great friend, the Führer, his exaltation would have overcome a blizzard. The Official State Visit. All the pomp of the preceding visits had paved the way for this. It was a long way from Predappio. He would suffer now with his usual cold – could feel it coming on, but just this once he did not care. He clenched his teeth, praying his nose would not drip. He clenched his hands too, arms rigid at his sides, legs wide apart to maintain his balance in the lurching vehicle. Chest puffed to bursting point, he managed to maintain his stony expression, only with great effort. A certain dignity was required, and really, the difference in height between him and Hitler was barely a few centimetres.

‘We passed like two gods over the clouds,’ he boasted to Clara that evening.

The streets glistened. The wheels of the cavalcade sucked and slobbered at the paving stones and tram tracks, spraying grubby water onto the shoes and trousers of the welcoming citizens. Duce! Duce! Duce! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!

Standing beside her father, Annabelle could smell his rage, more pungent than sweat.

‘Pagliaccio! Fantoccio! Vigliacco!’ Quietly. The time for shouting was past. A clown, a puppet, a coward. Achille would rather be dead than see this day – he said it over and over – but he had Annabelle and her mother to think about. Hysteria, he said. Hysteria. His long, narrow face was more lugubrious than ever. The chanting and salutes soared on the frosty air. A brass band played.

In sunshine, the colours of Florence were golden: ochre, sienna, umber. In today’s rain, the colours seeped and ran together into grey and greyer. Achille averted his eyes from the sodden swastikas drooping from the buildings, their scarlet and black piercing the drear of the day – the only colour anywhere. His muttering was in monotone too – he wondered they hadn’t put them on the Duomo as well … his own father saw that icing-sugar facade go up after so many centuries … thank God he was dead and couldn’t see this, not that he, Achille, believed in God … only an expression. And so on and so on.

November, the worst weather of the year. Annabelle’s nose and eyes were streaming, her lacy handkerchief a soggy mess. Her father handed her his own sensible, monogrammed one. She blew and wiped and sniffled, facing the procession. Her eyes flicked back and forth like a small animal in a forest, searching the crowd for Enrico. Please let him have stayed away, or if he came, please let him not do anything stupid, or if he did, please let him get away.

‘The imbecile,’ said Achille. ‘The country is broke, the army is a shambles, Italians are dying like flies in Russia, they’ve already surrendered in Africa and he still thinks he can ingratiate himself with that bastard. March on Rome! He did not march on Rome. He caught an overnight sleeper from Milan!’

Mumbling, grumbling, rumbling to himself – Annabelle had heard it all before. For the first time she thought of her father as old. His words formed bubbles of condensation like word-bubbles in cartoons. She prayed they could not be read here. Even in the house now, they had to whisper. The servants in town could no longer be trusted and neither could the contadini on the farm. It was appropriate tomorrow was All Souls Day, her father continued. The Day of the Dead. There were already too many dead in Mussolini’s wake.

Now, as the cavalcade swept by, Achille sighed deeply. ‘Let us hope it is over quickly.’

Did he mean the visit or the war? Annabelle shivered and pulled her coat tighter. Only last year they had stood here beneath a blue, blue June sky, listening to Mussolini’s voice booming from the loudspeakers: ‘An hour marked by Destiny is striking in the sky of our country.’ They were officially at war. Today, the sky was pewter, steel, lead.

‘Let’s go,’ said Achille, taking her arm to steer her against the surging tide. His nose was also running, but he did not have another handkerchief. With the back of his glove, he wiped at tiny droplets on the hairs of his nostrils and moustache. His greatcoat was wet through. He was only there because, like her, he was frightened for Enrico. As the motorcade and its roaring motorcycles neared Piazza Signoria, the crowd congealed to a solid mass, a single entity, a heaving and tossing restive animal. The cheering rolled in waves. Annabelle was not cheering. Many around her were not cheering. The tannoys on every corner spewed recorded cheering for them. Over the top of it, the trumpets from the balcony of Palazzo Vecchio heralded Hitler’s arrival at the Town Hall. Annabelle plodded beside her father, eyes raking the swirl of people, ears straining for the sound of shots or confusion. Nothing. Deep in the pockets of her coat she curled her fingers tight. Her chest was tight too, but it seemed Enrico and his friends had done nothing stupid, for today.

‘Are you going back out or staying in town, Papà?’ she asked.

‘No, I have an appointment with Aldo,’ Achille replied. ‘Do you want to go back to the country? It will be hard to get there today with all this confusion.’

‘No. I’ll stay with you.’ That way she could search for Enrico.

Achille nodded. ‘Talk some sense into your cousin.’

The saturated wool of her stockings pooled in heavy rings at her ankles. She hated the itch and smell of wet wool. Her plaited hair, normally so fair, was dark with rain and her head itched as much her stockings. Her father’s hat was soaked. It would be ruined – the brim dripped like his nose. They turned down via Roma. At least here, he rambled, via Roma really did once lead to Rome … via Roma … via Roma … Annabelle’s mind strayed. As they stepped from the kerb, her father put out a restraining arm to stop her walking into the path of a sleek grey and black Lancia. In the rain, the powerful car purred and gleamed like a wet panther. As it slowed to turn, Annabelle saw a driver in peaked cap and uniform, and in the back, a young woman in a dark fur coat, soft and high about her throat. Long, pearl drop-earrings bobbed against the fur. Glossy dark curls, a pale, oval face. As she leaned forward to speak to the driver, one gloved hand on the back of the seat, she glanced out the window into Annabelle’s eyes and away again. Annabelle’s gaze followed the car as it glided off in a spray of dirty water. Her father gave a soft hrmmph and took her firmly by the elbow, turning her towards home. In answer to her unasked question, he muttered to her to get a move on because he did not have all day.

Annabelle squelched from foot to foot on the carpet before the fireplace in her father’s study.

Achille put his head around the door. ‘I shall be back for dinner. It will be better if you stay in today, Tesoro. The streets are no place to be. Take off those wet shoes.’

He said nothing about the soggy patches on his Persian rug.

Annabelle nodded. She was not going anywhere. She waved her father off. The streets were never any place to be. Certainly not in her lifetime. Right from the Renaissance, really, and before. Florence, City of Strife. Her father had taught Classics at the university until he took early retirement rather than wear a Fascist Party badge. He had not worked since Annabelle was seven or eight. She had little memory of him working. Neither had Zio Francesco ever held a job that she knew of. He devoted himself to the oversight of the family investments and factories in the north.

Things would not be the same after the war. Enrico said so. Fear of Communism and the Bolsheviks and their land and labour reforms had made the upper classes wilfully blind to the excesses of the Black Shirts these last twenty years. They despised the fascists but were willing to allow them to do the dirty work. Enrico said so. The world has to change, he said, often. And not ‘so that all could remain the same’. Nothing would be the same. Enrico said so. Annabelle was permanently afraid. Everyone of her age had grown up afraid. She was tired of being treated as a child, ready to revolt, to take a hand in changing things, like Enrico – whatever he was doing.

Rain tinkled at the mullioned windows. She loved her father’s study with its burnished bronzes and gleaming walnut furniture. The patina of age and permanence mantled everything in a glow of safety, but there was no comfort for her there today. In the mirror above the marble fireplace the air trembled with the rising steam of her damp clothes, but she did not want to go upstairs to change. Enrico really was too difficult! He was thoughtless and completely irresponsible. Her father said so and it was true. She ached to look for him but she did not know where to start. She waited with a clutch in her stomach for what seemed like hours – and then he was there, face flushed, eyes burning. His clothes and hair were soaked.

‘Where were you?’

His breathing galloped wildly. ‘I was there. I saw you and Zio but I had to go to a meeting as soon as the cavalcade passed. Did you see those two arrogant crazy bastards!’ It was not a question. ‘Papà says that’s what you get when you put two teetotallers together.’

He did not laugh and neither did Annabelle.

‘The crowd was so thick I could hardly move.’ Her hands balled into fists by her sides. ‘I was afraid for you.’

His hair was wet too. A darker blond than hers, more light brown really, it was fine and very thick, even if the high forehead and sharp widow’s peak did not bode well for his hairline in the future.

Enrico’s breath settled but he was still taut with excitement. ‘Italians! There they are, the heroes, on their way to sign away more lives for Hitler’s war. Italian lives are cheap to Benito anyway.’

They had taken to calling him Benito between themselves but the irreverence failed to lessen the fear.

Now Enrico was safe, however, Annabelle had other things on her mind. ‘Is it true you went with Clarice?’

Her chin jutted and her voice wobbled. The daughter of friends, Clarice was seventeen, the same age as Enrico. Annabelle overheard him getting a dressing-down from his father last night, for an escapade with Clarice.

‘Ficanaso. Stickybeak.’ Enrico smiled. He flicked the tip of her reddened nose with her damp plait. ‘Went with! Mind your own business, Ciccia. You have been spying on Papà and Zio again. Listening behind doors. My little worry wart.’ His indulgent grin made her want to spit at him.

He too smelled of steaming wool. She could smell his sweat, a sugary-smell. Caramel.

At fifteen, Annabelle was already tall but Enrico towered over her by a full head and he was still growing. It was their Australian blood on the distaff side. Their Australian grandmother, Nonna Annabelle, Annabelle Drummond from Orange, was tall for a woman of those times and she came from a long line of males much taller. All that sunshine and food. Annabelle was named for her but her grandmother died when Annabelle was three. Orange, what a beautiful name for a town.

Australia was a ridiculous shape on the map, a whole country in a single continent. Imagine having a whole continent, all to yourself! A continent at the bottom of the known world. Further than the moon. The Gumnut babies lived there. Her mother read stories of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie from an old book with magical images of cherub babies with fat little bottoms, who lived in exquisite flowers, the putti of her Renaissance ceilings transposed to the New World. In another book, exotic creatures ate from a pudding that never got smaller. Antipodean fables were so much lighter and sunnier than the European myths and legends of vengeful Gods and poor children. She listened to all the stories – all of them, the old ones and the new ones, and she melted into them and tried on the lives she found there. What else did she have to do?

Annabelle had never seen Australia but when a distant cousin was executed by the fascists, Papà sent her brothers there, to relatives, to save them from being drafted into Mussolini’s army, or shot. It had been more than two years. Enrico was to have gone but now it was too late. He would never have gone anyway. She missed Giacomo and Umberto, and the whispers in the house frightened her. What was internment?

In Annabelle’s family there were more cousins than she could count. No-one of her age except Enrico, and Lorenzo, a little younger. Annabelle and Enrico had shared every story and every secret since they could talk. Now, most conversations between his father and hers about Enrico – half-heard, overheard and misheard – began with ‘Quel ragazzo …’ Annabelle had grown used to eavesdropping in a society where it was commonplace.

‘That boy …’ too had lived his whole life under the shadow of Il Duce, in a family that did not belong to the Party. At seventeen, he was in great danger. Soon, they feared, he would be conscripted for Mussolini’s war, or – more frightening and more likely – be arrested for some act of rebellion and disappear into the maw of Le Murate.

Seen from above, in the newsreel Annabelle watched at the cinema afterwards, the crowd on the day of Hitler’s state visit was a living organism, a brain-coral: a collective brain given over to a single function. Fascist propaganda newsreels were obligatory in cinemas before the screening of a film. In her short life, Annabelle had known no politics but that of Mussolini.

They had no contact with the main branch of the family and had long since parted ways with many friends and family as fascism drew a dividing line right through the middle of personal relations. Although she officially lived in the Kingdom of Italy, the flag of the National Fascist Party, with its gold Fasces and Axes, swamped the King’s Tricolour. Fascist posters loomed everywhere and on everything. D’Annunzio extolled the Duce in poetry and Marinetti shaped the art world to his visions. Mussolini’s thrusting jaw and bellicose oratory formed the backdrop to the daily events of her life. His bellowing voice bombarded every home with a wireless radio. It was only two years before Annabelle’s birth that the first radio broadcast in Italy went to air, but the Regime took to it immediately and radios in bars, schools and fascist headquarters and buildings pumped out propaganda, day and night. Florence was a city of military uniforms, marching feet and blaring loudspeakers …

When she was small, Annabelle had pined to be allowed to join the Sons of the She Wolf. She watched with envy as girls between eight and eleven participated in the Piccole Italiane, with all their sports and games, or the Balilla Giovani Italiani physical education programs, with exercises such as ‘farmers hoeing’ and ‘sailors rowing’. She gazed with wonder at their splendid uniforms with the ‘M’ on the buckle. She yearned to grow up to be part of the fascist dopolavoro circle, with all its sporting grounds and clubhouses and cinemas. What fun. But she was never permitted to take part in Mussolini’s ‘indoctrination program’, as her father called it. The cover of her school notebook in fifth grade carried a striking image of a child in uniform at attention, a rifle with bayonet over his right shoulder and the words Giovinezza in Marcia – ‘Youth on the March’ – across the top. Her pagella, her school report, was adorned with the word Vincere. Win. Conquer. ‘War,’ said Il Duce, ‘is to man what maternity is to women.’ It was too much. That was Annabelle’s last year of school. From then on, she was tutored at home.

London 2008

Memento mori

Delia checked the flashing screen. Her mother. There goes another half hour, she thought, watching her Blackberry jig across the wooden table beside The Guardian. Outside the window, Saturday people in Burberry and cashmere thronged Kensington High Street. She debated letting it go to message bank. Her mother was losing it a bit. Her father was worried too, but Bert was not given to confronting things before he had to. Her brother Tom was as hearty as ever: ‘Come on, Dellie, Mum’s always been vague.’ Alzheimer’s. No-one wanted to say the word aloud … Delia sighed and answered the phone brightly. ‘Hi, Mum.’

Today, Maddie’s voice was youthful and firm, though it must have been late in Sydney. ‘Hello, darling. Your uncle Enrico died last night.’

‘Shit!’ Delia closed the newspaper and fished out her address book. ‘I’ll go over straight away. What happened?’ … Whatever that means, she thought. Nothing had to happen. Enrico must be eighty-five, and hadn’t been well for a while, but he always behaved as if death did not apply to him.

‘Have you spoken to Belle?’

‘No. I’m about to telephone her now, but I wanted you to know first.’ Maddie had forgotten to reprimand her for swearing.

Delia rang off, found the number for British Airways and booked a flight to Florence for later that day. She ordered another coffee. Not that piss-weak French stuff this time, but a double-shot espresso. And an almond croissant. Why not! No matter how many almond croissants she denied herself, she never got any thinner … Enrico was not her uncle. He was her father’s cousin and Annabelle’s cousin, her second cousin. She had always called him Zio because he seemed too old to be a cousin. She sent a text to Annabelle who was her aunt, saying simply, ‘I’m on my way. There this afternoon.’ Between them, no more was necessary.

Florence

‘Eight o’clock is too early to kill yourself.’ Delia’s tone was light but her heart was not in it. Beside her, Annabelle faced the television, hunched into her high-backed armchair, chin resting on her drawn-up knees.

‘And nine o’clock will be too late,’ she replied. ‘I would like to kill somebody. Anybody will do.’ The 8 pm telegiornale was only ten minutes in but it was all bad news. The polls had just closed and counting had barely begun, but it was already clear that Silvio Berlusconi would be catapulted back into power. A leap year, 2008. Delia loved that expression. Leap Year. It carried a sense of vitality, hope, joy even. For superstitious Italians though, an anno bisestile brought bad luck and it looked like they were right this time. It had turned out to be a leap back into the past, with little joy and no vitality. All day, the terms ‘crushing victory’ and ‘greatest post-war majority’ boomed from the media, and not only from Berlusconi’s own TV channels.

Annabelle’s hands were splayed into her hair on either side of her face, reminding Delia of the way, when she was a small child afraid of monsters, she used to peek at the cinema screen through her fingers. On the low table before them, the pizza from the Neapolitan place in the street below congealed, untouched, into what looked like vomit. No-one was going to eat that tonight. Delia gathered the plates, walked to the kitchen door where she tipped the triangles into the bin from on high, threw the box onto the bench and picked up another bottle of wine. It was going to be a long night. She should have cooked something. At the best of times neither Delia nor Annabelle was very interested in cooking, and this was not the best of times. It was not yet the worst of times but it was shaping up that way.

Delia followed Italian politics closely but they did not affect her except as an onlooker. She was resolutely Australian. She loved the orderly nature of Australian politics and civic life. She loved the way her Australian history was so close to her: so recent, newly formed, still evolving. White settlement was concurrent with the French Revolution; Achille, her grandfather, was born only fourteen years after Ned Kelly’s trial in Beechworth. Although a Republican, she loved the ceremony of the old ways. The Queen and her aunt Annabelle came to Australia for her, the year she was born, she told a school friend in first grade …

In the bluish flickering from the screen, Delia observed, almost as if she had not noticed before, the knotted joints of Annabelle’s slender fingers and the vertical crevices at the sides of her face – suddenly she looked every one of her eighty-three years. It hurt Delia in her heart to see it, made her afraid. In Italy, Delia often found herself feeling like an indulged only child, in that country of only children. Annabelle was her rock, her mentor, her image of everything strong and dependable. She did not want to see fragility and vulnerability in her adored aunt. The ravages of time. Where on earth did that expression came from? Shakespeare? She wasn’t strong on Shakespeare.

In the half-light, Delia spread her own hands before her, examining the slender, slightly squared fingers with deep, regular nails. A little on the large side for a woman but nice, capable hands all the same. The scarlet polish was not the only difference between her hands and Annabelle’s. No sign of the inflammation and swelling at the joints that plagued Annabelle. Or not yet. Perhaps sixty was the turning point. Oh well, she still had a few years. Had to watch those kilos too. A kilo or two didn’t matter now, but … Delia was a bit apprehensive about sixty – it could hardly still be called middle age. The other milestone birthdays had come and gone without a blip on the graph but sixty … Shouldn’t you have more to show for sixty? A few books about dead Italians suddenly did not seem like all that much.

No husband? No children? Old ladies always asked that. The long and colourful procession of men had not turned up one who would have made husband material, or perhaps she was just not wife material. Certainly Marcus could not have been a father. As for children, she could have had them all the same; people did. Only it had never occurred to her. She saw a greeting card once with a woman, hand to mouth, saying, ‘Oops, I forgot to have children’. Most of her friends did not have children. Were they friends though, or more colleagues, acquaintances? Annabelle regarded most of the people she knew as acquaintances. She seemed perfectly happy with that situation but she was much more self-contained than Delia. Her cousins, Enrico’s daughters, Clare and Diana, were good company, but she could not recall ever having an intimate conversation with either of them.

Delia leaned to her father’s side, sharing her emphatic nose and the deepening horizontal lines of her forehead with all her Italian family. The Albizzi strain was geometric – spare, angular. Delia and Annabelle had Bert’s square jaw, thank God. It held things up well. Maddie tended to the curved and portly, her outline gently diffused as she aged, as if softly backlit, her waistline drowned in the ebbing tide of oestrogen. Maddie still looked like an hourglass, Bert joked, only with more hours in it. Delia worried about her weight and whether she should stop colouring her hair, but she could not be bothered worrying too much.

Bert radiated goodwill, though not given to conversation of any sort unless it was the price of sheep and wool. Maddie’s chatter turned largely on the doings of the Royal family and their own circle. They were happiest now at the homestead, pottering arm in arm, admiring the camellias. In a recent photo, they reminded her of Malcolm and Tammie Fraser. Or the Queen and Prince Phillip. They drank cups of tea with their dinner, ignoring Delia’s eye-rolling. They only occasionally went to Sydney these days and every couple of years, to London. They still loved London. Delia was born in London in the days when Bert and Maddie travelled by sea and stayed a year. They did not stay so long now and went less, as age overtook them. Maddie and Bert were fond, indulgent parents and she knew they loved her and were proud of her, even if she was a mystery to them, a bit of a cuckoo at times.

The boys, Tom and Frank, were made of the same prosaic stuff as their father. Both married girls from the country, settled on the family properties, wore RM Williams boots and lived exemplary lives. Neither of them had ever seen the need to learn Italian and their only overseas travel was to London. A bit suspicious of ‘The Continent’, they were. They were fond of Aunt Annabelle, but were amused and bemused by Delia’s deep attachment to Italy. Their sons attended Knox, where they played Rugby and cricket. Their friends were from their own schooldays, as if they had all set in aspic in that formative period of their lives and lived there ever since. Decency and convention dictated that they avoided any form of thought or conversation deeper than the weather, sport and the local news.

Delia was very fond of all of them … Fond, odd word. Was fond enough? she wondered. The word was used a lot in the family, as if they were afraid of anything deeper, wilder. The only person she was passionately attached to was Annabelle. How dare she show signs of mortality. The thought of Annabelle dying was like looking over the edge of an ice crevasse, into the endless blue depths of nothingness. It caused a pain in her chest: indigestion, heartburn. A burning of the heart.

Annabelle uncoiled from her chair and turned on two more lamps at the back of the study. At once the buttery light dispelled the ghostly pallor of the TV. Tensed and leaning forward to the screen, her thumbnail in the corner of her mouth, Annabelle was once again the fit, vibrant woman of daytime. She was still tall, straight, spare, and there was still as much goldish chestnut in her thick unruly hair as there was grey – testimony, as she put it, to the advantages of red wine and HRT. But Delia was unsettled. She had seen the skull at the bottom of the painting and the image was indelible. She could not unsee it.

Outside, beyond the milky glass of the ancient windows, Florence settled into evening. The Leap Year Florence of today. Florence, the modern city within the caul of a medieval one. Modern bars and restaurants vied with the Renaissance on every corner. Experimental art flourished alongside Botticelli, Brunelleschi and Masaccio. It was a city of jazz and modernity, where the past and the present and the future existed at once, within each other, like Calvino’s Invisible Cities. At her gym, Delia endured the drudgery of the electronic treadmill beneath the pale blue and gold of vaulted, frescoed ceilings from the sixteenth century and voluptuous Venuses who certainly did not need to bother with gymnastics.

On the screen, the news ground to a conclusion. Throughout the election campaign Berlusconi had adopted fascist symbolism, attacked democracy as outdated, derided the Euro and EU and even claimed ‘Mussolini never killed anyone, he just sent them on holiday’. Now, as his victorious leer filled the screen, both women stilled. Delia’s jaw actually dropped and Annabelle’s hand flew to her mouth. Wearing a black shirt and a hand-knitted hairline, his surgically reinvented face bulging with hubris, Silvio Berlusconi raised his arm to the nation in the fascist salute. Viva l’Italia!

‘Noooo! This is too much!’ Annabelle flung the remote control to the floor where it skidded across the tiles and shattered against the wall. The back flew off and the batteries rolled under the sofa. She launched herself across the room and gave a vicious jab to the off button of the TV. In the stillness, the batteries rocked back and forth, a metronome … The crisp April air carried the waft of shades passing. Delia shivered. Stop it, she told herself. It’s because Enrico has died. It has spooked all of us. The End of an Era – historians could not help thinking in epochs and eras.

Annabelle collected the pieces of the remote and clattered them onto the side table. ‘He did not have to see this. I cannot stay in this country any longer.’

Dealing with the past was much easier for Delia than for her aunt. Delia could simply decide not to revisit scenes of past pains or sadnesses, or indiscretions. She was good at moving on, leaving behind the past and all its accoutrements when it had outlived its usefulness, without a backward glance. Here in this old, old country, it was not so easy. For Annabelle, every day was lived on the same earth, beneath the same sky, on the same streets as the moments of her past, with all its tragedy and plangent memory. For Annabelle, Enrico, and all Italians, life had to be lived in all its quotidian mundaneness within the caul of a history of blood, passion, loss, love and hatred.

How do they bear it? she wondered. Does the power of the past leach slowly away when you walk its path every day? She could see that for Annabelle, the past existed in a dimension other than the physical and geographical, in a part of the mind and heart and memory having nothing to do with the external world. This, Delia realised, was yet another of the endless differences between Australians who roam the world and feel at home anywhere, and Italians with their visceral, atavistic attachment to soil and place. Much harder to escape the past here. It could very easily strangle you.

Annabelle’s brothers, Giacomo and Umberto, arrived in Australia by ship in 1938. Giacomo hated it from the first moment. He would have refused to disembark if he’d had any choice. Umberto, on the other hand, felt the weight of centuries lift from his shoulders and rise into that illimitable sky. He had never actually had a job, after doing a half-hearted degree in architecture. He knew all about Palladian form and nothing about how to actually build a house. He knew immediately though, he wrote, that here he could be anything he wished. He could breathe here; the air was lighter. Umberto loved Sydney Harbour and he loved the lack of history. He loved the way Australians simply turned their faces to the sea and their backs to the vast, rust-coloured emptiness behind them. He loved New South Wales and he loved the broad vowels of his Australian neighbours and the clipped English ones of his relatives. He did not even mind the urine stench of the roast mutton all Australians seemed to eat for Sunday lunch, which they called dinner.

When Italy joined the war, they were interned. His brother took it as a personal affront but Umberto could see perfectly why Italians and Germans would be viewed with mistrust, and he knew from news from home that English and Australians were being treated in the same way in Italy. He also knew, though, that many other ‘enemy aliens’ in Australia suffered much more than they had. On their release at war’s end, Giacomo took ship immediately for Italy and died on the voyage, of influenza. Giacomo had never been sturdy. Umberto happily worked out his time of internment as a labourer on the elegant property, Blackheath, belonging to the old grazing family, the Mortons. He married Madeleine Morton and within a few years, they had three children in rapid succession, of whom Delia was the last.

When Delia was born, he became Bert and renounced his Italian citizenship. He was naturalised. Neutralised, Delia called it as a child. She was reared mainly in English and she only spoke Italian on visits to Italy, or during her adored aunt Annabelle’s many visits. Once she was able to travel to Florence without her parents, Delia grew used to her Italian life with her aunt, between worlds, in the ancient building in Borgo Pinti with its five floors of relatives. Her father rarely used his apartment there, and she and her mother preferred to stay with Annabelle when they visited. After a time the room she used became her room, reserved from other guests. It seemed natural that she would gravitate to Florence for her university studies and even more natural that those studies would revolve around the families who had made Florence and her forbears. While their history stifled Bert, Delia carried it lightly, it not having been forced upon her.

Delia came to terms early with her mixed heritage. Tom and Frank always found their Italian name a bit of a worry, happy for it to be Australianised. Delia insisted on the correct pronunciation. She had romantic pretensions and enjoyed her exotic image. Albizzi was a mouthful, certainly, but Australia was full of stranger names than that in those days – Poles with waxed moustaches, Lithuanians with sad eyes, Estonians, whatever that meant, Serbs and Croats who carried knives, and lots of other Italians, but Italians much smaller and darker than any she had seen. Most of them were there to build the Snowy River dam. Most of them did not speak English. Many of the Italians did not speak Italian. Neither did Tom and Frank. For the boys, Albo was the obvious nickname and it stuck. Albo and Albi – boys’ schools were like that. St Catherine’s was not. Delia was Dellie only at home.

Bert’s was not the only title among his fellow internees, including one, he said, who claimed to be a prince: dime a dozen, Italian counts and barons. Always someone ready to take the piss – Bert learned a lot of his English from the shearers and jackaroos on the property. The King’s English that Bert learned as a boy was a different language from the gnarly vowels and the sly, wry humour of the shearing shed. That was the 1950s. In the 1960s, in Sydney and especially in ‘Swinging London’, it was quite fashionable to have a Florentine connection.

When Delia made her laconic way to Sydney University in 1972, with not much idea of what she wanted to do apart from meet boys who were not friends of her brothers, it seemed logical she would jump at the chance for a ready-made subject and Italian history did not seem too hard. Nothing seemed hard in Australia then – the fizzy optimism of Gough Whitlam’s ascension to the throne at home and the tempered hope of Nixon’s visits to China and Russia, coursed through the veins at social gatherings, together with cask wine. By then, she had become used to travelling back and forth between Sydney and Florence. Completely smitten with her exotic aunt, she would have done anything to please her, but following her into medicine was not an option because Delia had not exactly distinguished herself in the sciences at school, so, history it was. She thought history might be useful, though at the time she could not have imagined falling beneath the spell of all the early Medici. She fell in love at first sight with the Laurentian library: the arched cloisters full of potted orange trees around the central well, honey-coloured stones full of secrets, the great church of San Lorenzo with its rough unclad façade and porphyry and marble tombs. The moment she saw the sensuous sweep of Michelangelo’s majestic staircase and breathed in the heady scent of ancient books and young Italian professors, she realised history could also be sexy.

November 1, 1941

Our famous Duce could barely keep the grin off his face today. How I hate that man. I could kill him but I’m so afraid Enrico will. Papà is afraid. We are all afraid. I am tired of being afraid. I have been living with fear for as long as I remember of my life. All the fault of Il Duce. Enrico says it is the fault of Papà and Zio too and all of those who thought him a fool and did not oppose him.

‘So you found them.’ Delia leaned against the doorjamb, lanky, a little tense, with a nod at the diary in her aunt’s hand. ‘I could never keep a diary. I could not,’ she said, ‘even imagine committing to paper my innermost thoughts, let alone my secrets and indiscretions.’ She snorted. ‘Of which, I might add, there have been far too many.’

Delia had wanted to read Annabelle’s wartime diaries ages ago, wanted to write something about her aunt’s part in the rescuing of the art treasures looted by the Nazis. She had suggested Annabelle get the diaries out and go through them.

Annabelle had been resistant. No, she said. No. She had kept a diary since she was six years old. ‘I never read them. I never look back. I have no desire to go back. If the past is another country, then I no longer speak the language there. Anyway, diaries should be burned. I’m not even sure where they are.’

Yet, here they were, piled precariously on the desk. Annabelle turned, trailing her finger across the brittle page. She closed the notebook on her finger, marking the place, and regarded the tottering pile of diaries. Some were in worse condition than others, but most were still pretty good really.

‘I always … I … knew where they were. I haven’t had any desire to get them out until now.’

Delia nodded at the newspaper clipping in her other hand. ‘Is that it? Somehow it seems more official in the hard copy.’

Annabelle held it out to her. ‘It came in today’s post. The only time he did not have the last word!’

The piece of newsprint was much more real. So dry. Is that a life? Annabelle felt tremors from very deep within, which made her think of ground resonance. She once read that a helicopter, on landing badly, could shake itself to pieces if care were not taken. She took great care.

Delia crossed to her, put a hand on her back in a gentle caress and took the clipping. Backing up a couple of steps until she felt the sofa behind her knees, she sat, reading the Sydney Morning Herald obituary.

Enrico Francesco Albizzi 1925–2008

‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/and the hunter home from the hill.’

So he wished to be remembered, the distinguished Classicist, Professor Enrico Albizzi, who died this week in Sydney after a short illness. He was eighty-five. He leaves two daughters, the violinist Clare Morgan, and Dr Diana Croyden, whose work on tropical diseases is well known. Professor Albizzi immigrated to Australia in 1952 after completing his studies in Bologna. His translations of the early Roman poets are still used in schools today, and his recent translation of Marcus Aurelius from the Greek is credited with bringing the Stoic Emperor to a whole new generation. His fiery temperament added an edge to the Classics, said a fellow academic. He fought as a partisan in the Civil War in Italy, between 1943–45. He made a significant contribution to the nascent wine industry in Australia and was a well-known identity in the sailing fraternity, having participated in his first Sydney to Hobart yacht race in the year of his arrival. He only missed one race in the intervening years. His ashes will be scattered outside the Heads in a private family ceremony.

‘Are you all right?’

Annabelle smiled at the question. So Australian. ‘Am I all right? Yes, I suppose I am, my dear. We are all quite used to obituaries by now.’ She stood very straight and bit her bottom lip hard.

‘This isn’t just any old obit though, is it?’ said Delia.

Annabelle wandered to the window. Not just any old obituary. In the distance, thunder rolled.

It was nearly three years since Annabelle had seen Enrico and they did not part on good terms. He had been in Florence for something to do with the byzantine terms of his father’s will and the trust. It was Annabelle’s eightieth birthday and he’d insisted on taking her to lunch. He had something on his mind. We must talk, he said. Yes, she said. We must talk.

Always thin, Enrico was gaunt. His abundant white hair, still worn longish and brushed back, gave him the look of an aged lion. It had lasted him surprisingly well, given the high widow’s peak and his father’s early baldness. His eyes were unnaturally huge in the light refracted through the thick glass of his round spectacles. He was fading, like the Cheshire Cat. Soon there would be nothing left but his smile. It hurt her heart. Although he and Roberto had just completed a long walk in the Dolomites. He was actually as dogmatic and energetic as ever, despite being, surely, one of the last smokers in Australia – he had already been outside four times for a cigarette, cursing the recent laws that had finally arrived even in Italy. He was, as always, elegant and dashing in a soft linen jacket and open-neck shirt.

Too much wine loosened tongues. Too much talk. Too many words. Once words break free they cannot be reined in. Words traded, bartered, lying like stones on the table. For hours, they sat at the vast expanse of glass at the back of Omero’s. Annabelle gazed out over the Tuscan countryside, which looked as if peace had reigned there forever. Rolling green hills, bosomy folds etched with the darker green of Cypress pines; improbable, a child’s drawing of trees and hills. Le dolci colline. The sweet hills of Florence. Sweet now, gentle now, but fertilised for aeons with real blood and real bone. It was only since the 1970s that Tuscany had suddenly become the must-see tourist destination. Until then it had been just one more of the poorest regions in Italy, the glory days of the Grand Duchy a long way in the past. It was as if Tuscany had been reinvented with mass travel. In a sense, she supposed, that was true. She couldn’t remember using the word much: Firenze, Florence, you said. Or San Casciano. Or Impruneta. Chianti, never, unless you were going to drink it.

She played with her unsalted bread, picking bits from the dry centre and rolling it into doughy balls on the tablecloth.

‘Tuscany, nowadays, is a sort of construct,’ she said, turning back to Enrico.

He took a deep swig of his grappa and refilled the small glass.

‘Spare me the philosophical meandering, Stella,’ he said. ‘You always overthink everything. You and your fucking secrets. Where do we go from here? Are you or are you not going to come back with me? You cannot be worried about incest by our age. You worry too much.’

‘And you do not worry nearly enough.’ The tremor of Annabelle’s hand rippled the surface of her wine.

Neither had touched the artful dishes that had come and gone across the table. The second wine bottle was empty. For a long time she stared at his hands, spread on the stiff white cloth. He had her father’s hands – large, capable, smooth and very brown, with short practical nails. Workman’s hands, not the hands of an academic. Ernest Hemingway once said Mussolini had feminine hands. Enrico was missing two fingers of his left hand at the first joint, from when the grenade exploded while he was priming it. He remained intractably left-handed. His hands were still beautiful. ‘When I die, I will have loved you all my life,’ he had once told her and, in his own way, he had. In his own way.

‘We are too old to begin again.’ She looked up from the table, directly into his eyes. She could see herself reflected in the heavy lenses. ‘Acqua passata. Too much water under our bridge.’

‘Well, fuck you,’ he said and walked out. Leaving her to pay the bill.

Her throat ached. Nothing changes.

Rome 1943

The gilded cage

Clara was ready before her mother’s knock at the door. She gave a last check in the full-length mirror, pleased by the fall of the soft wool of her navy pleated skirt. She squirted one more spray of Arpège between her breasts – not too much. She replaced the tasselled, crystal perfume bottle, gathered her bags and descended the curve of the staircase to the foyer, where her driver, cap in hand, chatted with her mother. The keys to her beloved Alfa hung forlornly among the keys on a board by the front door. Ben had bought it for her and she loved it. The car sat, shrouded and on blocks, in the garage. Rationing. No petrol, no tyres. She nodded graciously, at the ‘Buon giorno, Signora’ from the driver, who followed her to the gravel drive where the taxi waited.

Surely, it would not be long before she would drive herself again. Still, she had to admit she did not mind the extra attention, the cloak-and-dagger ride from the family villa to Palazzo Venezia. The police escort, the clandestine messages at each checkpoint, the changes from taxi to motorcycle sidecar and back to a taxi, exhilarated her. The furtive entry from via Astalli through the courtyard and up to the Cybo apartment in a private lift had an air of the cinematic about it and she did love the cinema. It was an exciting punctuation to what could otherwise be endless hours of boredom. Please let Ben be in a good humour, she thought. Today, she was not feeling up to dealing with his behaviour if he was out of sorts. Which was more and more often lately.

Entering the wide double doors of the Zodiac Room, she sagged beneath a wave of fatigue. She had not fully recovered from the last miscarriage. Hormones, her father said, hormones were the cause of the debilitating blood loss. Whatever hormones were. In the reflection in one of the many tall gilt mirrors, her stomach was completely flat. That was something. Ben hated her to be fat, but he did not like thin women either so she had better be careful. She cupped her breasts in her hands; they were still nicely full. To her left on the sideboard were three dressmaker’s boxes. She wandered over, lifted the lid of the top one, flicked the pale blue tissue paper aside, let the lid drop. Not even new frocks could hold her interest today. Perhaps she was coming down with something. She massaged her temples. She fingered the pearl rosary in the pocket of her skirt but did not feel like starting a rosary either … one decade perhaps … but even that seemed too long today. At the small side table, she stood on one leg and flipped through Ben’s copies of Plato and Socrates. The books were much-thumbed, the pages dog-eared and covered in Ben’s annotations. Socrates was in Greek so she could not read that and though the copy of Plato was in Italian, it may as well have been Greek – it gave her a headache. Ben was so clever.

Careful not to smudge her make-up, she put her fingers to her temples again and massaged them gently. Ben hated her to wear makeup. Dirtying your face, he called it. It was the same with perfume. He liked the hair of her armpits and between her thighs to smell just a little. Not too much. To smell natural, but Claretta had her wiles and her ways. You had to be careful to look as if it were all natural. Really, it took much longer to look natural. She clicked her tongue: tsk tsk.

Clara regarded her reflection again. Apart from the minor distortions of such old glass, she was happy with what she saw. No grey hair yet. That was a relief because when her mother was her age, nearly thirty, she already had fine filaments of silver in her black hair. That could look very elegant … but not yet. She was glad her face was oval – wasn’t that supposed to be the perfect shape? She wandered across the room to the high step at the windows giving onto the lush garden of the internal courtyard. Her world began and ended these days with this room and that view. Last summer and the secret trips to the seaside seemed a lifetime away. Outside, the light had changed. Autumn, already mornings were chilly, dark. The leaves were turning too. She shivered. Behind her, the door opened but the footsteps were not Ben’s. Quinto Navarra entered, carrying the tea tray. He smiled at her, inclining his head in a small bow.

‘Will he be joining me?’ There were two cups on the tray.

He shook his head. ‘Who knows? Today has not gone well.’ His face said he felt sad for her. He waited.

‘Would you like a cup then?’ she asked.

Her loneliness filled the room.

Quinto Navarra was used to standing in for his boss and it seemed to happen more and more often. He smiled at her, poured himself a cup of tea and sat on the long sofa opposite la signora. Tea. He hated tea but they both affected to like it and he was never offered coffee these days. Ever since the gastric ulcer, coffee had disappeared from the menu of Il Duce. Like so much else, the days of extra strong espresso were long past. The March on Rome had been fuelled by coffee as black as pitch. Now the Regime ran on camomile, he thought glumly. Quinto had habituated himself to it. It was the least of the things he had learned to get used to.

In twenty years, his boss had never once asked his opinion on politics but he sought it on everything else. The only other person as close to Il Duce was Clara. Until she came into his life, Mussolini had been a lonely man. He had never had a friend that Quinto knew of. He regarded the woman seated before him, thinking that nowadays being Mussolini’s lover was not all that much fun. She was very pale today. Getting very thin. So was the boss. This stupid dieting of his was killing them both. He had always been a picky eater but it was becoming obsessional. With every month, the boss’s dietary restrictions got harder and harder to understand. He must have lost twenty kilos. Every week he had a new complaint but if you said anything, you got your head bitten off. If anyone else mentioned the health of Il Duce, it was almost regarded as treason.

‘Tell me who he has seen today,’ said Clara.

She could not, he knew, abide silence. She was always on the lookout for information, about the people around Ben and especially about her competitors. Quinto leaned back in his chair and recounted the morning’s discussion about the progress of the secret shelter being built for the Duce, deep beneath Palazzo Venezia. Then he related the amusing story of a visitor who had been thrown out for wearing a beard – could there be anyone left in the country who did not know of the Duce’s aversion to beards? He moved on to the details of the gruelling meeting with the Foreign Minister; the Duce’s son-in-law, Count Ciano, had left the meeting an unhappy man. Ciano had lost faith in the war and was urging the Duce to find a way to bring it to a conclusion. He argued ever more openly with the Duce’s policies and was ever more critical of the Germans. The Count was becoming careless, thought Quinto. Nevertheless, the Duce had noted with satisfaction that Ciano’s diaries were being kept up to date. The diaries were their insurance against carrying the blame for Hitler’s excesses, though it was important the Germans never saw them, as Count Ciano was well known to be no great friend of theirs. The Red Cross notebooks, filled with Ciano’s cramped script, lived in a small safe in the Count’s office.

Quinto knew, however, that Clara wanted to know about the others – the women. Her jealousy was legendary – the shouting and weeping and scenes of recrimination regularly leaked out beneath the heavy doors and washed over Quinto and the rest of the entourage. Il Duce’s habit of fathering children by his mistresses meant many of them remained in his life. The list was a long one. Angela Curti Cucciati – the mother of his favourite daughter, Elena – was a permanent thorn in Clara’s side, and Quinto was relieved to be able to say with impunity that she had not visited today. In fact there had been no female visitors, no ‘fascist visitors’, recorded in the usual slot in the log of Palazzo Venezia today.

There had certainly been the full complement of fervid letters from crazed female admirers. Some of them were quite disgusting, but the boss loved it all and always read their letters aloud to his staff and to Clara. He fucked more than the odd one or two as well. Said it was good for his health. Sometimes as many as four in a day and he even boasted to her about it. La Signora Clara seemed to take it as his due. Quinto shook his head. Doesn’t seem natural to me, he thought.

The camomile finished, he rose. ‘I will take this away and bring a fresh one when he comes.’

She had not touched the delicate biscotti.

Clara glanced at the cards and could not be bothered with Patience. Her nails – she could paint her nails, but then, Ben might come early and they would not be dry. She rummaged in the bottom of her bag for her cloisonné pillbox and extracted one small pill. Just one would not hurt. Well, perhaps two. She threw her head back, swallowed the pills without water and stood an instant, as if awaiting their effect. Gently she lifted the gramophone needle onto her favourite recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes, fished out her stitching and stretched on the sofa in the cavernous centre of the room, beneath the lapis and gold of the Zodiac. Her gilded cage.

Another long evening yawned in her face. She yawned back, tossed aside the stitching, took out her diary and flicked back through the pages of cramped handwriting. We passed like two gods over the clouds. Ben’s words to her after one of Hitler’s visits. She uncapped her pen. Writing their life had become her great consolation. She had written constantly to Ben since their first meeting, letters mostly, which she kept meticulously, along with his to her. The diaries she began in earnest the year after their love affair started, recording everything: every telephone call, every conversation. God knows she had enough time for it and for reflecting upon Ben and his mysteries. Sometimes she thought her life was actually lived more between the pages of her diaries than in reality.

By the time the sentries in the corridor stamped to attention for Ben’s arrival, the shadows had lengthened to become the dark. Clara jumped to attention herself, turned on the lamps and rushed to recline casually upon the sofa in what she hoped was an enticing pose, her skirt draped a little high. One look at his face told her she might as well not bother. Quinto Navarra followed him with a fresh tray of tea, which he placed on the table with the small dish of Ben’s medicines, then withdrawing without a word.

‘Would you bring some fruit as well?’ Clara asked as he neared the door.

‘I don’t want fruit. I’m not hungry.’ Ben did not sit but strode to the darkened windows where he planted himself, hands on hips, feet apart.

His jowls quivered, his neck now too scrawny for his collar. Why hadn’t Rachele ordered him new collars? It was the least she could do.

She suppressed a sigh. She could feel her shoulders going up. Don’t start, my love, she thought. Do not start. Tonight I cannot take it.

But she smiled and said, ‘Come and sit with me, amore. Has it been hard today?’

Time, Clara had learned, was a mutable thing. Some days it whirled and swirled and curled and left her dizzy. Other days it stalled and crawled. ‘Time is not linear’, Ben once said, in his schoolteacher voice. She was not sure what he meant but she certainly knew that time was heavy, that it weighed upon her and often pressed inexorably on her chest. Today it was suffocating her.

‘I am not feeling well at all.’ He paced and postured. ‘My head aches and my bowels are playing up again. I did not sleep at all last night.’

Nonsense, Clara thought, though her face did not say so. Ben affected to sleep little and his loyal subjects believed him to be always alert and working on their behalf, but she knew her Lion slept like a cub and could sleep through a war. In fact, he often slept through this one. I’m the one who doesn’t sleep for worry, she sniffed silently. Most afternoons while Ben slept on the sofa, she sat awake beside him, watching his face in repose, covering page after page of the heavy blue notepaper she used for her letters, notes and diaries. Navarra knew to awaken him only in the most extreme circumstances.

‘My son-in-law has been at it again. And I’ve been locked up with Achille for most of the afternoon,’ Ben continued. ‘He has some thoughts on a new national holiday. It might have merit.’

Achille Starace. She hated him. The feeling was mutual. ‘I’ll bet he has some thoughts. He has thoughts on everything,’ she said.

Ben’s brow lowered. ‘Don’t be stupid. Just because you have an irrational dislike of the man does not mean he is not a genius.’

She did not like the way Ben slapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other, rising up and down on the balls of his feet. It was not a good sign, but today Clara was not heeding signs.

Starace. That man and his manias. He had gradually altered the whole way Italians lived their daily lives. True, some of his ideas were good but Clara liked the way people used to shake hands. Now it was no longer allowed. Too English, Starace said. So everyone had to give the Roman salute. It was all right for men perhaps, but it was ridiculous for women. Now anyone who shook hands was designated a bad fascist, of dubious character. It did not stop Ben shaking hands with his dear friend the Führer though, she noticed. On the other hand, the way Ben’s title must be entirely written in capitals pleased her. DUCE. It definitely carried more weight. It had been Starace’s idea to have the lights of Palazzo Venezia burning all night so the citizens would think their DUCE worked all night for them, and it was a good idea too, though Ben had enough sense to have the lights turned off after midnight. Let us not exaggerate, he said.

‘You are obsessed with Achille,’ Ben said.

‘No,’ she said, her voice rising dangerously, ‘you are obsessed with him. You listen to him more than me.’

‘Well, at least he is loyal to me. He will be loyal to the end.’ He hiked the needle off her Chopin record, scraping it across the shellac, and dropped it roughly in its cradle.

‘Loyal!’ She heard her voice crack but there was no turning back. It was going to go that way tonight; she could see it. ‘I am the only one who is loyal to you, who is here by your side day and night, who truly loves you. And how dare you call me stupid.’

Most of the time Clara tried to placate him: diffuse the bomb, soothe her Lion, turn away the wrath – but when Ben wanted a fight, nothing on God’s earth would deflect him. Try as she might, the dam would burst and the blows would rain. Sometimes she did not care, and this was one of those times.