III
I
When he was four a splendid thing happened; Gian-Luca was given the freedom of the shop. It had been impossible to do other than accord it, short of tying up Gian-Luca’s legs, so Teresa threw open the door from the parlor and said: “Go—but do not steal the pickles.”
This occurred one morning in July, when the warmth of the sun was busily engaged in coaxing out endless smells. The street door was also standing wide open, and through it came a series of rumblings and shoutings that expressed the spirit of Old Compton Street.
The shop! All his life Gian-Luca remembered those first impressions of the shop; the size of it, the smell of it, the dim, mysterious gloom of it—a gloom from which strange objects would continually jump out and try to hit you in the face—but above all the smell, that wonderful smell that belongs to the Salumeria. The shop smelt of sawdust and cheeses and pickles and olives and sausages and garlic; the shop smelt of oil and cans and Chianti and a little of split peas and lentils; the shop smelt of coffee and sour brown bread and very faintly of vanilla; the shop smelt of people, of Fabio’s boot blacking, and of all the boots that went in and out unblacked; it also smelt of Old Compton Street, a dusty, adventurous smell.
Gian-Luca stared about him in amazement and awe, he had never known before this moment how truly great Nonno was, but he saw now that Nonno distributed like God, and that what he distributed was good. From the ceiling were suspended innumerable coils of what looked like preserved intestines. They may possibly have been intestines at one time, but when Fabio sold them they had beautiful names: “Bondiola,” “Salsiccie,” “Salami di Milano,” in other words they were sausages. The sausages varied as much in figure as they did, presumably, in taste; there were short stumpy sausages; fat, bulging sausages; sly, thin sausages; anatomical sausages. There were regal sausages attired in silver paper, there were patriotic sausages in red, white and green, and endless little humble fellows hanging on a string, who looked rather self-conscious and shy.
And the pasta! There were plates of it, cases of it, drawers of it, and all the drawers had neat glass fronts. The glass-fronted drawers were entirely set apart for the aristocracy of pasta. One saw at a glance that social etiquette was very rigidly observed, each family of pasta kept strictly to itself, there were no newfangled ideas.
There were paste from Naples, marked: “Super Fine.”—Tagliatelle, Gnocchi, Zita, Mezzani, Bavettine, and the learned Alfabeto. There were paste from Bologna—cestini, farfalle tonde; and from Genoa, the conch-like decorative bicorni and the pious capelli di angelo. There were paste shaped like thimbles and others shaped like cushions and yet others like celestial bodies; there were rings and tubes and skeins and ribbons, all made of pasta; there were leaves and flowers and frills and ruchings, all made of pasta; there were yards of slim white paste that suggested vermifuge, and many leagues of common macaroni. The common macaroni had to fend as best it could—it lay about in heaps on the floor.
But not alone did Fabio deal in sausages and pasta, he dealt in many other things. Providing as he did a smell for every nose, he also provided a taste for every palate. Huge jars of plump, green olives, floating in turgid juices, stood ready to be fished for with the squat, round wooden spoons; a galaxy of cheeses, all approaching adolescence, rolled or sprawled or oozed about the counter. Tomatoes, in every form most alien to their nature, huddled in cans along a shelf; there were endless sauces, endless pickles, endless pots of mustard, endless bins of split and dried and powdered peas. There were also endless bottles containing ornate liquids—Menta, Arancio, Framboise, Grenadine, Limone—beautiful, gem-like liquids, that when a sunbeam touched them glowed with a kind of rapture—came alive. Chianti in straw petticoats, blinked through its thinnecked bottles, suspended from large hooks along the walls, while beneath it, in the shadowy bins, lurked yellow Orvieto, full-blooded, hot Barolo and the golden Tears of Christ. Apples, nutmegs, soups and jellies, herring-roes and tinned crustacea, rubbed shoulders with the honey of Bormio. A kind of garden this, a Garden of Eden, with a tree of life on whose long-suffering sides had been grafted all the strange stomachic lusts of modern Adam. And as God once walked conversing with His offspring in the garden, so now, the worthy Fabio moved among his customers; a mild-faced, placid Deity, himself grown plump with feeding—smelling of food and wine and perspiration.
In the little wooden cash-desk sat Teresa at her knitting, with a pen-holder stuck behind her ear. A black-browed, imperturbably austere, regenerate Eve, completely indifferent to apples. From time to time she laid aside her knitting, found her pen, and proceeded to make entries in the ledger. Gian-Luca, looking at her, felt that Nonno might be God, but that Nonna was the source from which he sprang. Nonna controlled a drawer from which flowed gold and silver; enormous wealth, the kind of wealth that no amount of saving could ever hope to find in money-boxes.
Gian-Luca had suspected the omnipotence of Nonna, and now his suspicions were confirmed. He knew, had always known, that Nonna must be worshipped, that moreover, she was worthy of his worship. For one thing she was beautiful, she had small, black, shining eyes, and hair that reminded him of coal. He often longed to rub his cheek against her glossy hair, only somehow that would not go with worship. He adored her bushy eyebrows—one eyebrow when she frowned—not unlike Nerone’s moustache—and the downy, dusky look just above her upper lip, and the tallness and the gauntness of her. He admired her long, brown fingers with their close-pared, oval nails, and her heavy ears that held the filigree gold earrings. He admired her blue felt slippers and her flannel dressing-gown, and most of all the queerness and the coldness that was Nonna in relation to Gian-Luca himself. It would be:
“Nonna, Nonna!”
“Yes, Gian-Luca, what is it?”
“See my horse! Look, I will make him run!”
And the horse would run, would gallop, on his little wooden wheels, but Nonna would go on with her knitting. Or:
“Nonna!”
“Yes, Gian-Luca?”
“I want to kiss your finger.”
“Do not be foolish, fingers are for work.”
“Then may I touch your earrings?”
“No.”
“Then may I see your knitting?”
“Gian-Luca—run upstairs and play with Rosa.”
She was conscientious, quiet and she never lost her temper; Nerone had large rages, even Fabio had small rages, but Nonna very seldom raised her voice. And he loved her. With the strange perversity of childhood, he found her a creature meet for love. Her aloofness did but add to the ardor of his loving, to the wonder and fascination of her. From the room that had been Olga’s, he would often hear her footsteps passing and repassing on the landing; now surely she was coming—she was coming in at last; but she never came—Gian-Luca wondered why. It was Rosa who swept that room and tidied up his toys; it was Rosa who washed his hands and slapped him and caressed him. Rosa would call him: “piccolo,” “amore,” “cuore mio,” but Teresa called him Gian-Luca. Fabio would call him “angiolo,” “tesoro,” “briccone,” but Teresa called him Gian-Luca; and in this there lay great loneliness, great cause for speculation, and yet greater cause for further loving.
II
Teresa looked up from her knitting one evening, and her eyes rested long on her grandson.
“Gian-Luca, come here.”
He slid off his chair and went to her, shy but adoring. The light from the lamp lay across her long hands and fell on one side of her hair. It fell on Gian-Luca and illumined him also—a thin little boy in a black overall with a large smear of jam down the front.
“You have spilt your jam, Gian-Luca,” said Teresa promptly, but her eyes were not on the stain; then she did a very unexpected thing, she suddenly touched his hair. For a moment her hand lingered on his head, feeling the ashen-fair mop, feeling as one who is blind might feel, seeking for sight through the fingers. “This has nothing to do with us,” she said slowly.
Fabio put down his paper and frowned: “You mean?”
She was silent for a moment, pointing. Then: “This hair has nothing to do with us,” she repeated in her flat, even voice.
Fabio’s frown deepened. “What of it?” he muttered. “What can it matter, the color of his hair?”
But Teresa had turned the child’s face to the light and was staring down into his eyes.
Gian-Luca’s eyes, neither grey, blue nor hazel, were a curious compound of all three. They were limpid, too, like the cool, little lakes that are found high up in mountains. His were the eyes of Northern Italy—the eyes that the vast barbarian hordes, sweeping over the vine-clad fruitful valleys, had bequeathed to the full-breasted, fruitful women—the eyes that they would see in their sons.
“Nor have we such eyes in our stock,” said Teresa, and she pushed Gian-Luca away.
He stood and surveyed her gravely, reproachfully, out of those alien eyes.
“It is bedtime,” she told him. “Little boys must go to bed.”
“Si, si,” agreed Fabio anxiously. “They must.”
Gian-Luca went up and kissed Teresa on both cheeks; every evening he kissed her like this, on both cheeks, as family custom demanded. Then he turned and kissed Fabio also on both cheeks; Fabio was very prickly to kiss, for he shaved only twice a week.
“I will come and turn out the gas,” Teresa told him, “and do not take too long undressing yourself, and do not eat the orange Nonno gave you until tomorrow, it would make your stomach ache.”
Gian-Luca nodded and went towards the door, but in looking back he felt anxious and perturbed to see that Nonna had dropped her knitting and was staring blankly at the wall.
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.
IV
That day he said: “Rosa, tell me, who is Olga-how-lovely-she-was?”
Rosa went crimson. “You listen!” she chided, frowning at him darkly.
He ignored this remark and clung to his point: “Who is Olga?” he persisted. At the back of his mind was a far, faint memory of having heard that name before.
“You come quick, or I go tell Nonna! You come quick out!” scolded Rosa; and then relenting, “Oh, look, look, caro! See those pretty flowers, Rosa buy you a bunch.”
He was not deceived, though he took the flowers and allowed her to stoop and kiss him. For some reason she did not like Olga, that was plain—perhaps because Olga had his sort of hair.
At dinner he looked up from a plate of macaroni and said suddenly, “Who is Olga?”
There ensued a long moment of deathly silence while Teresa and Fabio stared at each other; then Teresa said quietly: “Where have you heard?”
And Gian-Luca answered: “Last night.”
“Olga,” said Teresa, “was my little girl. She is not here, she is dead.”
“Olga,” said Fabio, “was your mother, Gian-Luca.” And getting up slowly he went to a drawer. “This is her picture when she was small—this is Olga, Gian-Luca.”
Gian-Luca clapped his hands: “Pretty, pretty!” he babbled, delighted with what he saw.
Teresa and Fabio exchanged a quick glance, then Fabio put away the photograph. Teresa took up her knitting again—she was knitting a waistcoat for Fabio. Gian-Luca watched her efficient brown hands moving in the bright-colored wools; he was thinking of Nonna’s little girl. Nonna’s little girl was a matter of importance, was something that he could understand; moreover, it was comforting, it brought Nonna nearer, it made her seem so much more accessible somehow, and more—well, a trifle more like other people. Rosa, for instance, had a little girl now, a plump, fretful creature of two and a half; her name was Berta, and she grabbed Gian-Luca’s toys with amazing acquisitiveness for one who was so young. Rosa would dump her down on the floor while she swept and dusted his room in the morning, pausing now and then to exclaim in admiration: “Bella, la mia Berta!” And then to Gian-Luca: “Bella, la mia bambina, non e vero?”
Gian-Luca thought that Berta was cross and fat and ugly, and in any case he was rather jealous of her, she took up too much of Rosa’s time. But Nonna’s little girl looked neither cross nor ugly; on the contrary, she was pretty and had masses of dark hair. He stared across at Nonna; had she ever played? he wondered—with him she was anything but playful!
Nonna must have felt that his eyes were upon her, for she raised her own eyes and said, not unkindly: “We will not talk of Olga, Gian-Luca.”
“Why?” he protested.
“She is dead,” said Nonna: “one does not talk of the dead.” And after that nobody talked any more, so the meal was finished in silence.
V
In the afternoon Fabio reached down his hat and went in search of Gian-Luca: “Come, tesoro, I will take you for a walk, Nonna will guard the shop.” He held out a friendly hand to the child, and together they turned into the street. “Would you like to go and play with Berta?” inquired Fabio, anxious, as always, to be kind.
Gian-Luca shook his head, but after a moment: “I would like to play with Olga.”
Fabio said dully: “Olga is in heaven, she cannot play, piccino.”
“No?” Gian-Luca’s voice sounded doubtful. “Do they not play in heaven, Nonno? Do they not want to play?”
“They are with God,” Fabio told him gently.
“And will not God play with them?”
“God does not play.”
“I do not like God,” said Gian-Luca.
“And yet He is good—” murmured Fabio to himself. “I am almost certain He is good—”
They walked on in silence for a while after that; it was hot, and Gian-Luca’s legs began to flag, Fabio stooped down and took him in his arms.
“Nonno is a horse, you shall ride!” he said gaily, as though to reassure the child.
Fabio ran a little and Gian-Luca laughed, thumping to make him go faster. In this manner they returned to Old Compton Street; the sweat was pouring down Fabio’s face. At the door of his shop stood Rocca, the butcher, enjoying the balmy air. Rocca saw Fabio:
“Buon giorno, Capitano!” Rocca had been a good soldier in his day, and now he used military titles for fun. “Buon giorno, Capitano!” he shouted.
Rocca was much esteemed for his meat, which was usually both cheap and tender. He was also much esteemed for himself—an honest fellow if somewhat lacking in the gift of imagination. As a rule, his display of edible wares was moderately unobtrusive, but today he had something arresting to show; Rocca had purchased a couple of kids, which dangled outside his window. The kids were very realistic indeed, they hung there complete, pelts and all. Their little hind legs were bent back over sticks, their noses pointed to the pavement. They looked young but resigned, and their patient mouths had set in a vaguely innocent smile. In their stomachs were long, straight purposeful slits through which their entrails had been drawn. Despite that innocent smile on their mouths, their eyes were terribly dead and regretful, and as they swung there, just over the pavement, they bled a little from their wounds.
“Belli, eh?” demanded Rocca.
“Ma si!” agreed Fabio, lifting Gian-Luca higher in his arms, whereupon Gian-Luca burst into tears.
“Oh, poor—oh, poor—” he sobbed wildly.
“Ma che!” exclaimed Fabio, genuinely astonished, “what is the matter, piccinino?”
But Gian-Luca could not tell him, could not explain.
“Can it be the little goats?” inquired Fabio incredulously. “But do not cry so, my pretty, my lamb, they cannot hurt you, they are dead!”
“Ecco!” roared Rocca in his voice of a corporal, “Ecco!” And producing some fruit drops from his pocket he offered them to Gian-Luca.
But Gian-Luca turned away. “Oh, poor—oh, poor—” he wailed, until Fabio, shaking his head, carried him home, still weeping.
“No doubt it was the heat,” he told Teresa afterwards. “I thought he might be feeling the heat.”