VII
I
Although Gian-Luca had noticed before his departure that Teresa was very short-handed, the exigencies of his work at the Doric, and later on of his military training, had prevented his suspecting the full depths of the disaster that threatened the Casa Boselli. Even Maddalena who now went there daily, only vaguely suspected the truth at first; for how could she know the amounts that were owing? Teresa never spoke of these things; the deeper her trouble the less it became vocal—that was Teresa’s way.
It was not a dearth of customers that was killing the business, but a dearth of commodities to sell them; a stoppage of nearly all the supplies that should have come from Italy or France. Italy was producing less and less, while daily requiring more and more for home consumption; one after another her exports were failing, and with them the tiny, struggling atom known as the Casa Boselli. Those fine new glass cases that had cost so much money, and that should have been harboring delicious things to eat, now harbored nothing but mendacious tins—mendacious, because they were all completely empty. Fabio had scrubbed them and soldered down their tops, then set them along the shelves, for anything was better than the heartbreaking void in those acquisitive glass cases.
One by one the men employed by Teresa had been consumed by the war; like the food—the salami, prosciutto, mortadella, parmesan cheeses and decadent tomatoes—they had ceased to contribute to individual stomachs. For now there was only a universal stomach, whose size and capacity no man could gauge; the stomach of a horribly greedy modern Moloch, for whom the armies must be fattened.
The new shop was now almost entirely deserted, there being no Italians to tend it. Two young English girls who had stayed for a fortnight had left to work in an aeroplane factory; Teresa’s eyes had got on their nerves—always watching, always spying, they had said. There had followed a series of young girls and men, all most unsatisfactory, according to Teresa; the English did not like her imperious ways, and she on her part thought them lazy, and said so. No doubt they were trying, but then so was Teresa, who spoke little, it is true, but those words when they came, were as hard and as sharp as her eyes. And then there had been those zeppelins over London, which, while failing to strike real terror to the heart, had succeeded in laying a fuse to all tempers. People felt peppery after a raid, and Teresa’s employees had proved no exception.
Maddalena was ordered to serve in the old shop, in which were now gathered together all the forces that remained to the Casa Boselli, that is, all save the last adventurous stronghold that still stood to Teresa as the symbol of success, her unique macaroni factory.
The macaroni factory! All night long she lay awake, as straight and as stiff as a corpse, beside Fabio; scarcely twitching a muscle in case she should rouse him, in case he might talk, disturbing her thoughts. All night the thoughts whirred like wheels in her head—like the wheels of the macaroni factory—wheels made of steel that turned faster and faster, stretching their leather bands tighter and tighter—and the bands were somehow a part of her head. All night those wheels whirred out first this thought then that, frightening thoughts because of the darkness. Not a German and Austrian invasion combined, not a sky full of zeppelins, not a world full of fire, could have equaled in terror those whirring thoughts that came as she lay beside her husband.
For the macaroni factory was threatened on all sides, the forces of disruption were closing in upon it. There was now no expert left to attend to the machines, or to mix that enormous mountain of flour—sixty pounds with an egg to each pound. Francesco had been called up and with him the others, and in their stead, one poor, bewildered Anglo-Saxon struggled resentfully to cope with the pasta; and the longer he struggled the less apt he became in its delicate fabrication. And then there was the flour—a dreadful, grey mixture of wheat, barley, maize, and Heaven alone knew what other disgusting adulteration; a gravelly, husky, unpalatable outrage. Why, the very machines spewed it forth. You could turn it into something resembling dough, you could stir it and knead it and put it through the rollers—one hundred times you could roll it and more—and when you had finished, your fine rubber sheeting would be lumpy and harsh and vile to the touch as a hand that is covered with corns. Who could cut pasta from such stuff as this? Who could produce the simple lasagne, let alone the ornate bicorni?
“And yet,” Teresa would think in the darkness, “I will never abandon my beautiful factory! Life itself has not beaten Teresa Boselli, then shall it be said that she is beaten by flour—so flimsy a thing, so foolish a thing, that a puff of breath can disperse it? I will master this accursed new filth they call flour—yes, but how? But how? But how?”
Every morning she would get up looking gaunter than ever, and would hurry down to her factory. There she would gaze with something like despair at the untidy traces of yesterday’s failures. When the poor Anglo-Saxon arrived she would point with an angry, accusing finger.
“So much waste!” she would exclaim. “You must make the flour go further.”
“Cawn’t be done!” he would assure her, loudly sucking his teeth.
“It has got to be done,” Teresa would say coldly. “If you cannot do it there are others who can.”
One day he had retorted: “Very well then, you find ’em.” After which he had demanded his wages and had left.
“Imbecile! I am glad that he has gone,” frowned Teresa. “I am glad to be rid of the untidy pig. I must find a younger man to take over this work.” But no one whom she found gave satisfaction.
II
That Christmas the pains in Fabio’s back were rather more violent than usual, and in consequence he thought a great deal about God and much less about the Casa Boselli.
It was now his duty to help Maddalena to price their diminishing stock; his the task of watching a fluctuating market that bucked up and down like a turbulent bronco, thoroughly out of hand. But somehow those pains in his poor old back, together with his thoughts about God, made such trifles as customers, food and money, seem very far off and unimportant, so that sometimes now he would make mistakes, on the wrong side, too, for the Casa Boselli. Then it was that Teresa would undress him and rub him and swathe him in yards of red flannel; after which she would push him back again between the shafts, like an antiquated horse that only stands up because it is strapped to its toil. He would hobble about consulting his price list and dolefully shaking his head.
“Is it the bacon that has risen?” he would ask, “or is it the last of those imported hams?” And Teresa would have to desert her cash-desk and reprice the stock herself.
Maddalena did all in her power to help them, but she had her own trouble to bear, for Gian-Luca’s letters from France were very brief. He had not yet got his transfer, it seemed, and was working as a sergeant in charge of a mess somewhere far back at the Base. He said very little because of the censor, but his wife could read between the lines, and what she read there was a great discontent. Those were dreary little letters that Gian-Luca wrote home from the Officers’ Mess at the Base. And yet she was thankful, oh, deeply thankful to know that her man was safe; and now she redoubled her prayers to the Madonna, begging that the transfer might never be granted, begging that the creature she loved might come home unharmed when the war was ended. But sometimes while she prayed she would feel strangely guilty as though she were betraying Gian-Luca; as though she were plotting behind his back, as though she and the Madonna were plotting.
“It is only my fancy—” she would try to tell herself. “Every poor woman, all over Europe, is praying for her husband’s safety.” Yet so anxious was she that she went to St. Peter’s to consult old Father Antonio.
Father Antonio smiled at her confession and proceeded to reassure her. “Your prayers will be answered as God thinks best. He knows that you pray for your husband’s conversion, and He knows that you must pray for his safe return, for is it not He who puts love in the heart, and who knows the way of that love? I would not worry about it, my daughter, I would just confide in the Madonna, and she, through God’s grace, will do what is best—I think I would leave it all to her.”
After that Maddalena felt a little more happy, but she wished that Gian-Luca could get leave. His letters said nothing about coming home; perhaps he was afraid of losing his transfer—perhaps he was staying out there by choice, hoping to get sent into the trenches if he stayed—could he do that? She wondered.
Meanwhile Teresa now sat long into the night, trying to balance her accounts. She would have to go upstairs to rub Fabio’s lumbago, but when she had done this she would go down again to her office and get out her ledgers. Perhaps a letter would have come that evening—a letter from the bank, requesting payment of the interest that was overdue; a letter that she dared not ignore for a moment, while not knowing how to answer. Alone in her office sat hard old Teresa facing defeat and disgrace; facing an incredibly empty world as she had done nearly thirty years ago. Then she had lost the fruit of her womb, Olga, the beloved; and now she might lose the fruit of her brain, the fruit of a lifetime of unceasing toil—the beloved Casa Boselli.
“Cento, duecento cinquanta—” she would mutter, staring down at the figures; and then she would get up to pace her small office, and then she would sit down again. She would think: “If only we could get our supplies, if only we could get our supplies!” There were moments now when she would have walked to Rome in order to fetch a tin of tomatoes. Then her thoughts would begin to spin round and round like the wheels in the macaroni factory; “My pasta—my wonderful pasta—” she would murmur, and her voice would be almost tremulous with sadness. “Who can I find who will make me my pasta, now that Francesco has gone?
III
After Christmas Fabio felt a little better, and so he thought less about God. Indeed, by the New Year he had almost recovered, and this was to the good, for the factory machines were crying out loudly for attention. Fabio, so his wife had discovered since the war, had a very cunning hand with machines; he could make fine adjustments with accuracy, oiling and coaxing the while.
“Sii buono, sii bravo; suvvia!” he would coax; and then, strange to say, the machines would run smoothly, as though they wished to pleased Fabio.
That January Fabio adjusted the machines, after which they gave much less trouble; but by March there was no one in the factory to run them, for the latest acquisition had thrown up his job, preferring to make munitions. Now indeed Teresa had her back against the wall, for she could not replace the man. There was plenty of good work going those days, and better wages than she paid to be earned. Then week by week the flour was growing worse, becoming more difficult to mix; she would gladly have taken on the factory herself but that she must needs be always in the cash desk; and as for Maddalena, she was wanted in the shop, besides which she had never learnt how to make pasta. Yes, but old Fabio had—he might try to deny it, but Teresa knew that he lied. As a lad he had worked in a macaroni factory, he had told her so many times in the past, it was therefore quite useless to lie. And, moreover, it was being a deserter, a traitor to the Casa Boselli in its need.
“It is you who must make the pasta,” she told him, “it is you who must run the machines, it is you who must help me to save our business. Ma che! You are old, but you are still a man, and you know how the pasta should be made.”
“No, no,” he whimpered, “I do not know, Teresa. If I once knew, then I have forgotten—and my arms have grown weak for the kneading of flour, and my back is weak too from those horrible pains. As God is my witness I cannot do it! I am old—very old, Teresa.”
“Yes, and I too am old,” she answered harshly, “but I do not whine like a cur. I say: ‘No, I am not yet utterly defeated, and while I have breath I fight.’ ”
“But my back, my miserable back—” he pleaded, peering at her face with dim eyes.
“A little work will limber your back; a little work hurts no man,” said Teresa.
And knowing that further resistance was useless, Fabio muttered “Si, si.”
So all through that war-racked, agonizing spring Fabio tried to make pasta; tried to lift and carry and knead and roll the strange-colored flour, till his aged arms were corded with hard, blue veins. It was pitiable how little he made, considering his long hours of toil—not enough to throw to a coop of chickens, according to Teresa—but Fabio worked on in an anguish of spirit; dumb, too, because when a man had grown old what was the use of complaining? The sweat would go pouring down both his cheeks and drip into the dough unperceived; and sometimes there would come a queer singing in his ears, and long, floating black things in front of his eyes, so that he must needs stop and take off his glasses, in order to brush away those black things. But the black things would remain, and now in addition some flour would have got into his eye; and when this happened he would go to Maddalena, who would make him wet his handkerchief with the tip of his tongue, after which she would wipe out the flour.
“Poverino!” she would think as he turned to leave her. “Poverino! He grows very feeble. It is cruel to make him do such heavy work—but then Teresa is cruel.”
Yet in spite of herself she was forced to admire this woman of steel and iron, this gallant old pilot who clung to the wheel while the storm increased in fury; this woman who did not spare Fabio, it was true, but who did not spare herself either. When Maddalena wrote to Gian-Luca these days, she wrote with admiration of Teresa; but she did not tell him what she herself suspected, namely, that the Casa Boselli must go under in spite of those hands on the wheel. Not for all the world, much less for Teresa, would she have worried her man; nor would she have touched one penny of his savings for fifty Casa Bosellis. Now Maddalena also had her back to the wall, but she was fighting for Gian-Luca. He had little enough cause to be grateful, she felt, to this woman who would not love him. He had worked ungrudgingly all his young life, and what he had earned he should keep. Yes, he should keep it, though the Casa Boselli were split to bits on the rocks. For though neither Teresa nor Fabio mentioned money, Maddalena had eyes in her head, and what she was never told of she guessed—and then there was Nerone, who began to talk freely about Teresa’s large debts. Teresa’s speculations were now an open secret, as most secrets were in Old Compton Street.
“Dio! That Fabio is a fool!” said Nerone. “Any man is who is ruled by a woman, but then Fabio was always a poor fool.”
IV
That summer came a series of rather bad air raids, and Fabio was openly afraid. He would sit in the office under the pavement, praying, with his fingers stuffed in his ears, or begging Teresa to take him to the Tube, where Rosa had gone with the twins. Teresa, however, despised such precautions.
“If we die, we die,” was her motto. “The Tube is for mothers with little children, not for old men like you and old women like me. No, I will not let you go to the Tube,” she would say. Then Fabio would begin to cry.
The raids added much to his misery, for now he could never go to sleep. “Do you think they will come tonight?” he would enquire, peering anxiously up at the sky.
Nor could he be sure that they would not come by day—there had been a bad daylight raid—and sometimes now, while he kneaded his dough, he would pause to listen, mistaking the whirr of the wheels for an aeroplane. He began to suffer from stupefying headaches and a full, tight feeling in his head; the dough he was kneading would go round and round, and with it the machines and the room. If he stood in a draught he would feel his lumbago, that terrifying pain across his back—supposing a raid should come at that moment and catch him unable to move—
But one day in October, the God of his lumbago drew nearer, becoming the God of his soul; and Fabio’s old knees gave under him, and his head fell forward and lay upon the table, and his cheek lay buried deep in the flour that his weak hands had failed to mix.
That was how they found him two hours later—just a little, old bundle that had once been a man, with flour on its clothes, on its hands, on its face; flour, too, on its halo of white hair. All foolish weakness he had been, that Fabio, and very often afraid; afraid of Teresa, afraid of God, and latterly terribly afraid of the Germans. He had little enough to tell of himself, now that he must face St. Peter at the Gate—but perhaps he said: “I tried to make pasta—I did try very hard to make pasta—”
V
Now that he was dead and gone, everyone knew how much they had liked poor Fabio. They missed the mild-eyed, deprecatory figure that had wandered about Old Compton Street for more years than they cared to remember. But Nerone knew how much he had loved Fabio, and that was a very different thing. Nerone mourned the friend of his youth, and with him the passing of his own generation.
“I suppose it will be my turn next,” said Nerone. “I am not so very much younger than he was; but God grant that I die in Italy—when this war is ended Nerone goes home.”
“So you shall, papa,” comforted Rosa.
“Ma sicuro!” Mario said kindly.
After the funeral Nerone spoke little, but he went to the cupboard and found his dominoes. He turned them out on to the sitting-room table, where he dusted them one by one; from time to time he spat on his finger and rubbed some dirt off an ivory face, then, he laid them back gently, reverently even, as though they were poor little corpses. He made Rosa go out and buy him some striped ribbon—the green, white and red that they were selling in the shops—and with this he carefully tied up the box, then put it at the back of the cupboard. Thus, the dominoes had a small military funeral, being laid to rest in the colors of their country; and all this for the love and honor of Fabio, who had not had a military funeral.
Teresa was alone now at the Casa Boselli, alone, too, at night in her bed. No need to lie stiffly not twitching a muscle, for now there was no old husband to wake—Fabio was sleeping very soundly. All night long she could think undisturbed. Oh, and Teresa had very many thoughts, some of them coming unbidden to her mind—queer, faraway thoughts about sunshine and youth at a time of the gathering-in of the grapes. And the thoughts would paint pictures for old Teresa, and then she would begin to remember. Into these pictures that worried and perplexed her would come walking a quiet, unimportant little man; a man with the eyes of a patient dog whose importunate loving wearies the master, who, nevertheless, must keep it to guard him. Then, less dimly, would come the figure of that other—so gallant, so merry, so passionately young, so anxious to drink youth down to the dregs—ay, and to make her drink with him. And face to face they would stand, those two men, as perhaps they were standing now—who could tell? For she was the debt that had lain between them, the debt that Fabio had paid for that other, who had been unwilling to pay.
How futile a thing was this so-called life, which always ended in death—the death of Olga, the death of Fabio, the approaching death of the Casa Boselli. Struggle and sweat and sweat and struggle to make fine good pasta in the turmoil of war—that was what Fabio had done, and had failed, for down he had dropped like a little old bundle, beside his huge mountain of flour—Fabio the patient, the timid, the foolish—Fabio, the father of Olga.
Thoughts, always thoughts, intolerable thoughts; but not pity, no, for pity was weakness—weakness that might lead you to pray for the dead; you, who had long since done with prayers.
Teresa would sit up stiffly in the darkness, with her thin hands clenched on the bedspread. Her hard black eyes would be staring at nothing, now that she had them wide open. Then one night she must suddenly speak to the Madonna to whom she had not spoken for years.
“You think I am beaten!” she told her fiercely. “You are glad to think that Teresa is beaten, Teresa who will not serve you. But no, you are wrong, for Teresa is not beaten—she will never be beaten while she lives! If she has to sell matches as a beggar in the streets she will not be beaten by you to her knees.”
And then she listened as though for an answer, an answer that did not come. For not in poor, faltering human speech could the Mother of God reply to Teresa.
“Ah!” said Teresa. “You answer me nothing, you wish me to think that you are angry. The foolishness of it! You are a thing of plaster that my hands destroyed easily many years ago. Less than a minute it took to destroy you—of course you can answer me nothing!”