II
I
Fabio reared himself up in bed. It was past midnight, and the candle was guttering prior to its final extinction. Fabio’s hair, a disheveled halo, stuck out grotesquely above his ears, his nightshirt, unbuttoned, snowed the thick, black hairs that gave to his chest a fictitious look of strength, and his eyes so mild and placid by nature, harbored something very like anger.
“I will have him baptized!” he shouted suddenly. “And I will have him called Gian-Luca!”
Teresa, her throat modestly concealed by the collar of her cotton nightgown, her hair brushed severely from her brow and plaited, her hands clasped before her on the red coverlet, looked at her husband coldly.
“Why baptized?” she inquired as though surprised. “And if baptized, why Gian-Luca?”
Fabio turned to her: “Is it you who speak so—you who have always been so pious?”
“I have done with piety,” said Teresa quietly, flicking some dust from the bedspread.
“And you would deny him the rites of the Church?”
“I have done with the Church,” said Teresa.
“Ah! Then perhaps you have done with God, too?”
“Yes, I have done with God, too.”
Fabio stared at his wife aghast. He had not been a practicing Catholic for years; still, he had had his ideas about things, and God had been one of his ideas. Something angry and pitiful was stirring in his heart on behalf of the small Gian-Luca; a feeling that he was not receiving fair play, that for all he, Fabio, knew he was being deprived of some mystical, incomprehensible advantage, of something that he had a right to, and the more his heart smote him the angrier he grew.
“He shall be baptized!” he repeated furiously.
“Forms—” murmured Teresa, “just meaningless forms—” and she shrugged her angular shoulders. The child began to cry, and stooping down she rocked the wicker bassinette. “Just meaningless forms,” she murmured again, and then: “Why Gian-Luca, Fabio?”
“It came to me so—it came to me, ‘Gian-Luca,’ I cannot say more than that.”
“It came to you so?”
“Yes, I thought ‘Gian-Luca,’ as I took him from you that night.”
“I see—a sign from heaven, I suppose?”
“Corpo di Bacco!” bellowed Fabio. “Corpo di Bacco! I will baptize him now, I myself will baptize him!”
He lunged out of bed and over to the washstand, dipping his fingers in the jug. Bending down to the now quiet infant, he made the sign of the cross on its forehead. “Gian-Luca, I baptize thee,” he muttered fiercely, “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Then his anger suddenly deserted him. He looked up at Teresa; she was watching the proceedings with a little smile on her lips.
Feeling cold and rather frightened, he crawled back to bed and tried to take her in his arms. “My Teresa,” he whispered, “be gentle, my Teresa, don’t hate our little grandson so much—be gentle to him for Olga’s sake—perhaps, she can see us, who knows?”
“Fool!” said Teresa. “Olga is dead; it would have been better if the child had died too. I feel nothing any more, neither love nor hate, my heart is broken. Can a broken heart feel?”
“I will try to mend it for you,” he pleaded.
“You!” she said, turning her face away.
The candle guttered and went out. Fabio stared miserably into the darkness; he prayed a little but without much hope, he had always been rather hopeless in his prayers, always a little too fearful of God. And meanwhile the newly baptized Gian-Luca had mercifully gone off to sleep, his crumpled face was pressed into the pillow, his round, shiny head, ridiculously bald, was slightly bedewed with sweat. From time to time Teresa’s hand dropped softly and set the cradle in motion; this she did automatically, from a sense of duty and custom. The rocking of the cradle fell into line with a hundred other everyday duties that must and would be accomplished, and presently Gian-Luca would fall into line too. He would never be neglected; like the shop and the house he would always be kept clean and sweet, and like the shop and the house he would come to long at times for the hand that disheveled, that rendered untidy, in a foolish access of affection.
II
Gian-Luca having no one to talk to, and having no language wherewith to talk in any case, found himself, as all infants must be, at a great disadvantage in relation to life. Had his mind been a blank, as people seemed to think, it would have been easier not to howl; but his mind was a turbulent seething muddle, in which colic and darkness and the sudden flare of gas-jets and ticklings and prickings and stupid grasping hands and uncomfortable confinement in preposterous positions, were all jumbled together in nebulous chaos, impossible at first to disentangle. From this chaos one day there suddenly emerged a creature who was beautifully concrete, a kindly young woman who had always been there and had always borne a relation to hunger and to hunger’s ultimate appeasement. But whereas before she, like everything else, had been part of the haze called life, she now emerged a well-defined being that was capable of arousing anger or approval, capable of being smiled at or howled at, capable even, of being thumped. She could open her bodice and give you what you wanted, or she could refuse to do so. In the latter contingency you felt blind with rage, in the former you felt much less than was supposed, much less indeed than you appeared to be feeling; in the former you quickly became atavistic, doing what you must, automatically, because something, somewhere, ordered you to live.
The concrete creature was Rosa Varese, the daughter of Nerone who sold tobacco a little way down the street; she was married and had lost her own baby of croup in the very nick of time to provide you with dinners, but all this of course you did not know, nor would you have cared if you had. Your emotions were entirely concerned with yourself, not through any wish of yours, but by order of that something that commanded you, Gian-Luca, to live.
Side by side with the curious mystery of food was the mystery of safety-pins; the first inanimate objects these to emerge from the nebulous chaos. They could press, they could prick, they could feel hard and cold, in fact they could fill you with fury; but—and this was what was so strange about them—they could fall into your lap and look very alluring—beautiful even when they lay in your lap, so beautiful that you wished to pay homage and in consequence put them in your mouth. Safety-pins, no doubt rather humble in themselves, were nevertheless important; through discovering them you discovered other things such as coal and soap and thimbles; in a word you developed your sense of beauty, and your instinct told you to worship beauty by trying to swallow it.
But although you were fast becoming familiar with the joys and sorrows of life, there were still big gaps in your comprehension; for instance, the things that they put on your feet—they caused you a most peculiar sensation, you wanted to cry, you wanted to laugh, you wanted above all to pull them off. But whenever you succeeded in pulling them off, someone was always there to slap your hands, and this, in view of your awakening perceptions, struck you as outrageously unjust. And then there was that thing they put on your head, it tormented you and tickled your ears; you were fastened to it by something soft, something that went under your chin. One day you discovered that the something soft could be chewed, and in consequence you chewed it—you did not try to swallow it like beauty—and since you could make but small impression with your gums, why did they always pull it away, making sounds meanwhile that you disapproved of?
Sounds! You began to listen for sounds, you tried to make them yourself, you began to feel that it was not enough to crow or to howl or to gurgle. You began to feel that given time, you yourself would make sounds that counted; you were still rather vague as to what they would be, but you knew that somewhere out of the void would come sounds that belonged exclusively to you; others might make them but that would not matter, for with some sort of magic that you did not understand, the fact that you made them would mean that they were yours, as surely as your mouth was yours. One way and another you were full of curiosity, full of a desire to do things. When you had done them they occasionally hurt you, as when you bit the buckle of your pram-strap and made your gum bleed, but taken on the whole you considered it worth while, and the next day you ducked your head and bit the thing again—that was the way to face life, you felt.
III
Rosa spoke seldom but cried very often, so that poor Gian-Luca had not the advantage of hearing those consoling expressions of endearment that presumably help the infant subconscious to resign itself to life. Had he not possessed a great joy of living, in spite of colic and other tiresome things, Rosa’s tears might very well have damped him; as it was they only irritated. Her tears had a way of dripping on to his head in the very middle of dinner, and he vaguely divined, as it were by instinct, that they spoilt the quality of the dinner itself, which was of course quite inexcusable.
He could not understand the element of tears, they were wet like his bath but they tasted different, and they came for all sorts of unexpected reasons, for instance when you bumped your head. Rosa would stare at Gian-Luca in silence, and then there would come a noise in her throat, sometimes a series of noises even; “Mio bambino—” and then more noises and something splashing off her on to him. They usually spent the day at the Bosellis’, but every night she returned with Gian-Luca to her father’s tobacco shop down the street where she and her husband lived. She was young and bereaved; she gave of her milk but not yet of her heart, that was not to be expected; her heart was far away with quite another baby, whose food Gian-Luca was consuming.
Gian-Luca had a queer, old wooden cradle beside the bed shared by Rosa and her husband. He liked Rosa’s husband, a handsome young man who roared and slapped his thighs; not so much to please Gian-Luca as to please himself—he had never quite grown up. He did a delightful thing too, every morning, he smeared a species of foam on to his chin; he smeared some on to Gian-Luca’s one day, and Gian-Luca licked it off. The tobacconist was not quite so amusing, still, it must be admitted that he had a wooden leg. … The leg made a most arresting noise when he walked—thump, thump, thump, thump—Gian-Luca would listen, and rock with excitement when he heard it. If it had not been for a tendency to colic, every minute of the day would have seemed worth while, but of course one’s stomach being nearly the whole of one, it is apt to have very large pains.
Rosa’s husband was a waiter at the Capo di Monte and when he came home, which he did very late, he naturally wanted his sleep. He suffered from a swollen joint on one foot, and this made him angry at times. Between Gian-Luca’s colic and Rosa’s tears and the pain in that joint when he took off his shoe, his nights were becoming decidedly unpleasant, which reacted on them all in the mornings. There were mornings now, growing more frequent of late, when his roaring, even to Gian-Luca’s ears, did not suggest a game; when he and Rosa would settle down to quarrel, which they always did in English because they both disliked it, and because each knew that the other disliked it. Their quarrel-English was particularly florid and beautifully free from restraint; it largely partook of Saturday nights outside the George and Dragon.
Gian-Luca learnt that certain sounds were ugly, that they made you feel strangely disturbed and unsafe. He also learnt that some sounds might be soothing, as for instance when Mario and Rosa made it up with many soft murmurings and kissings. As the weeks turned into months he became all ears, he became a kind of reservoir for words. The words went filtering into him through his very skin, and finally emerged in one loud, triumphant vocable: “Gug!” said Gian-Luca, and then—“Gug!”
But “Gug” was not enough, gratifying though it was, it could only express Gian-Luca, and by the time Gian-Luca had known the world a year, he had come to realize that to make one’s presence felt one might have to express a few other things as well—a bore perhaps, but there it was. Gian-Luca looked about him for the next most worthy object, and wisely decided that four legs and a tail, to say nothing of a thoroughly soul-satisfying bark, had every right to his attention. “Dog!” said Gian-Luca, staring at the mongrel that wandered in and out of Nerone’s little shop.
“Doggie!” said Rosa, as one talking to an infant.
“Dog,” repeated Gian-Luca firmly.
“Poveretto!” wept Rosa to Mario that evening. “That his first word should be ‘doggie’ instead of ‘mamma,’ poveretto—what a world of misery we live in!”
“You would think so if you had my bunion,” grumbled Mario; then he kissed her, for of course a dead baby hurt far more than even the most virile bunion.
But though Rosa wept with pity, Gian-Luca did not weep; what the ear has never heard and the eye has never seen, the heart of one year’s beating cannot mourn for. In his vast self-satisfaction he walked towards the coal box, fell down, got up, fell down, and finally decided that Nature was not mocked, and that progress on all fours was the only mode of locomotion.
IV
Fabio was told the marvel, Gian-Luca had said “Dog,” and Fabio was thoroughly offended.
“Nonno, Nonno, Nonno!” he cried, pointing to himself. “Little Gian-Luca must say, Nonno!”
Gian-Luca eyed him kindly, he liked his funny hair, and reaching up he pulled it politely.
“Ecco!” exclaimed Fabio. “He is as strong as any giant, but all giants call their grandfathers ‘Nonno,’ don’t they Teresa? They say: ‘Nonno, Nonno!’ ”
Teresa looked up from a mound of pale grey knitting, then she dropped her eyes again without speaking. She was always knitting something in her spare time these days, knitting had become her obsession. She knitted in the shop, in her cash-desk, during meals, and at night she would knit herself to sleep. She knitted very fast, with a harshly stabbing needle, occasionally raising the needle to her head for a swift, proficient scratch between the stitches.
“Pearl one, knit two, pearl one,” murmured Teresa glancing at a book that lay beside her.
“Nonno! Nonno! Nonno! Say Nonno!” shouted Fabio, shaking a finger at Gian-Luca.
“Poveretto!” began Rosa, with her apron to her eyes, preparing to burst into tears.
But at that Teresa suddenly looked up from her knitting. “Basta e supera, you hear?” she said sharply; then, as though she had forgotten Rosa, “Knit one, pearl one, slip one.” Gian-Luca considered “Nonno” for some weeks before he finally said it, and when he did so he made a grave mistake; he applied it, not to Fabio, but to the wooden leg of Fabio’s friend and rival down the street. The leg had been particularly active for some time, Gian-Luca had heard it for an hour, and when its owner, balancing himself against the counter, had actually lifted it and waved it in the air—“Nonno!” screamed Gian-Luca, beside himself with pleasure.
It was very unfortunate that Fabio should have entered to buy some Macedonia at that moment. It was even more unfortunate that Nerone should have laughed, with something like triumph in his eyes. Fabio surveyed the group, thrust his hands into his pockets, and left the shop without a word.
“Ma che!” exclaimed Nerone, in an access of delight, “Ma che! I think him jealous of my stump!”
For fifteen years these two had behaved like ageing children; quarrelling, boasting, teasing, and loving—always loving—but quick to take advantage of each other whenever it offered.
“That salame—very bad, your place is going to pieces, Fabio. You naturalize yourself and then you sell us bad salame, the salame looks at you and then goes bad.”
“I do not sell bad salame—mine is the best in England. As for you, you talk and talk, then sell rotten cigarettes, all powder, one might as well smoke snuff.”
“You accuse my cigarettes, straight from Italy they come.”
“Teresa says they come more likely from the Ark. Teresa says I cough—‘That is Nerone,’ she says, ‘with his rotten Macedonia all dropping out one end.’ She says: ‘That is that old fox Nerone.’ ”
“Ah! So that is what Teresa says. Well now, tell me this my Fabio, you find tobacco in my smokes, is it not? What else do you find, beside tobacco?”
“The dust from the shop.”
“Oh, I find much more than that—oh, much more, in your salame.”
“And please, what do you find?”
“If I tell you you will get angry.”
“Not at all, I know my salame, he is prime.”
“Prime you say? Santa Madonna! Listen to him, prime he says! Very well, then, it is prime, but—I find a little worm. He looks at me, I look at him, he bows, I lift my hat. I have him in a tumbler, come and see!”
For fifteen years these two had played dominoes together, drinking Amarena in the evenings. When Fabio lost the game—as he nearly always did—Nerone would openly rejoice; if, however, Fabio won it, Nerone lost his temper, and that made Fabio happy for a week. When both their wives had been alive, before Nerone became a widower, they had managed to quarrel over them:
“My Lucrezia, what a cook! What a marvelous risotto! Why do you let your Teresa boil her rice into a pulp? You should send her here, Lucrezia will teach her how to boil it.”
“Then you send us your Lucrezia, and we will show her zabaione, we will teach her not to turn it into lumps like scrambled eggs!”
But when sorrow had come upon them—and to Fabio shame as well—they had ceased to nag each other for the moment. They had turned away their eyes, while their hearts grew kind and shy, neither had wished to see the sorrow of the other. They had found no words, or if they spoke they did so fearfully, timid of saying the wrong thing. And when Lucrezia died, Fabio sent a wreath of iris, so large that it ousted all the other floral tributes. And when Olga died, Nerone sent a splendid cross of roses, and: “I will have them white, all white,” he told the florist.
V
No sooner had Gian-Luca found his tongue, than he found his feet with a vengeance; there were setbacks, of course, but to all intents and purposes he quickly became a biped. His adventures increased and multiplied, leading him now into strange, alluring places: the backyard, for instance, where the empty cases stood, festooned with flue and smuts. These empty packing-cases attracted him greatly; they were dirty, they were hollow, and queer, fantastic labels, together with all sorts of scrawls and lines and crosses appeared on their battered sides. To do them justice, they were very wise old cases, having travelled with aplomb all the way from Italy. Gian-Luca, of course, was not aware of this, still he felt that there was something about them … This conviction of his grew and grew, until he longed for a fuller communion, a communion only to be properly attained by filling the void with himself. Into the lowest and kindest of the cases Gian-Luca heaved his minute proportions, to discover—as occasionally happens—that in life it is simpler to get in than to get out, and this revelation when it came was terrific; he was rescued half an hour later by Teresa; still, there had been that half-hour—
At about this time they weaned him from Rosa, and Gian-Luca made his first acquaintance with sorrow. Rosa came daily to push his perambulator, but Rosa, without the comfort of her breasts, was not Rosa to him any more. She seemed cold and aloof; “tout passe, tout lasse …” but naturally Gian-Luca did not know this fact as yet. Though Gian-Luca sorrowed, yet his Rosa rejoiced, she no longer splashed him with tears; if her lips trembled now they did so with smiles, any more, she was constantly laughing. “I will bring you a little new friend, one day soon!” she had taken to whispering in his ear; and sometimes she led him into a church, and sat clicking her rosary just above his nose, while he kicked and protested on her lap. “You must not tell Nonna where we have been,” Rosa would caution, holding up her finger; just as though Gian-Luca knew where they had been, or could have told Nonna if he had!
Sometimes Rosa would stay on and play with him a little in the room that had once been Olga’s, but more often he would be shut up there alone, and this, for some reason, he did not object to—he liked the room that had been Olga’s. There were bars in front of the window now, and a high nursery guard for the occasional fire, but beyond these two drawbacks the room was all his, his to do with as he listed. He could twist the large knobs on the washstand by the window, he could crawl away under the bed, he could climb along the charming slippery horsehair sofa or toboggan down the seat of the chair. He could stare in fascination at the deep wounds in the wall; one just above the bed and four just opposite. He longed to put his finger into these deep wounds, but found that they were too high up. In the region of the wounds the paper hung torn and jagged—it looked like mutilated skin; and Gian-Luca, all agog with primitive instinct, would ache and ache to tear it away.
“Gug!” said Gian-Luca, returning fiercely to his first form of self-expression, “Gug! Gug!” And his small hand would grasp the empty air in its eager will towards destruction. Except for those five wounds the walls were quite bare; Teresa had left them just as they had been on the night when Olga died. Only the Virgin, together with her bracket, and the Heart—whose bleeding no hand ever staunched—had gone, and in their place were the wounds that Gian-Luca longed to prod.