III
Gian-Luca was usually quite happy in the darkness, after Teresa had put out the light. The darkness had never held terrors for him; he liked it, he found it friendly. Moreover, when he closed his eyes and lay half dozing, he would sometimes see pictures inside his head; vivid and clear and beautiful they were, like a landscape after spring rain. Gian-Luca knew something of trees and grass—once or twice he had been on excursions out of London with Rosa and her husband—but nothing he had seen then came up to his pictures; the only trouble was that they faded away if he so much as drew breath. In Gian-Luca’s pictures there were wide green spaces, and once there had been running water; sometimes there were low-lying, faraway hills, and sometimes a kind of beautiful gloom—green, from the leaves that made it. The pictures were happy, intensely happy, and Gian-Luca grew happy as he saw them. By the next day, however, he had always forgotten their most alluring details; he would have to wait until he went to bed again, and then the darkness would remind him; back would come memory and sometimes new pictures, and that was why he liked the darkness.
Tonight, however, the pictures would not come, though he shut his eyes and waited. The act of shutting his eyes disturbed him, it reminded him suddenly of Nonna. Nonna had stared down into his eyes; she had felt his hair too, and had said things about it—she had said things about his hair and his eyes, things that he had not understood. For a moment, when her hand had rested on his head, he had thought that she meant to caress him; Nonna was not at all given to caresses, still, for one moment he had thought … Well, then he had realized, without knowing how, that Nonna was not being kind—she was not being actually unkind either, only—she hated his hair. He lay and pondered these things, bewildered, and his heart felt afraid because of its love. It was dreadful to love a goddess like Nonna—a goddess who hated your hair—
He began crying softly to himself in the darkness, a sniffling, lonely kind of crying. The pictures would not come and Nonna would not come; why should she come when she hated his hair? Still crying, he drifted away into sleep and dreamt of hair and eyes; quantities of fair hair that blew about him, strangling; two strange, pale eyes, that snapped themselves together and became one enormous, threatening orb, watchful, coldly vindictive.
He woke because there were voices in the room; Fabio and Teresa were undressing. From his cot that stood beside their double bed, he could see them moving about. They spoke in hissing, insistent whispers, doubtless lest they should disturb him. He closed his eyes again, pretending to sleep, he did not want Nonna to look at him just then. Her voice sounded different, perhaps, because she whispered, perhaps because she hated his hair. The same words recurring over and over—“Olga,” and then: “But his hair—his eyes—” over and over again. Long after both of them had climbed into bed they continued whispering together; they always seemed to be whispering about Olga, and once Nonno said, “How lovely she was!” And Gian-Luca thought that Nonna sighed. No, he could not bear it; he put out his hand and tweaked the sleeve of her nightgown. He could hear the swift movement of surprise that followed.
“Go to sleep, Gian-Luca,” she said coldly.
After that they did not whisper any more, and he must have obeyed her and fallen asleep, for the very next moment it was morning.