In the Wolf's Mouth (24 page)

‘It’s not like sleep.’

‘No.’

Luisa looked at the young American, at his soft inward eyes. His neck was so tense that his head trembled sometimes. Luisa could see the arcs of sinew inside rising out of his shoulders.

‘You’ve seen some terrible things.’

Ray was tracing a pattern on the floor with his fingertip. His face opened in a laugh but he didn’t look up. ‘I’ve seen some terrible things. Yes, I have.’ The smile went from his face again. He frowned down at his moving hand. ‘Not a lot I can do about it. And you have too, now.’ He looked up at her, his mouth hanging open in sorrow.

Luisa smiled at him, a new thought amusing her. ‘I like you so much,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why. I don’t know you really. People I know very well I don’t like the way I like you.’

It was the darkness that made these words possible, the night and their clandestine solitude. There was nothing familiar or ordinary there. They were alone. Luisa could have such thoughts and there was nothing to prevent her from saying them out loud. She was free.

‘That’s nice,’ Ray said. ‘You’re very kind to me.’

‘It’s because I like you,’ Luisa insisted. Mauro Vecchio, with all his power and position, saluted by people as he passed, didn’t have what this American boy had. It was suffering, the authority of pain. His pain was the dark beautiful flower of the deepest experience.

‘I like you so much,’ Luisa went on, ‘that if you wanted to I would let you kiss me.’

Ray looked up. ‘You what?’

‘I’d let you kiss me.’

Ray felt his heart sink down inside his chest. He looked at the Princess. She was smiling at him. She was glittering and fragile as new ice. The flaw was in her eyes, their gaze slightly fractured with fear. The moment was breakable. It was his responsibility to handle it with care. Ray said, ‘I can’t stay here for ever.’

The Princess was sitting very straight. Evidently she was waiting.

‘Now?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Why not? Why shouldn’t he? Only for some reason he hesitated. It was too much. But she was waiting. Ray moved onto his hands and knees and started crawling towards her.

Luisa watched him coming, prowling closer. His mouth was open. His eyebrows were knitted together in concentration. He looked passionate.

Ray reached her. Her face, gold-coloured in the candlelight, was in front of his, separating into its details: the light swimming in her eyes, her starry eyelashes, her lips and teeth and nostrils. She closed her eyes,
composed herself for the event. Ray leaned forwards and pressed his mouth against hers. He felt the warm blasting exhalation from her nose against his cheek. He felt her teeth beyond the soft barrier of her lips. He felt nothing, emptiness, the collision of two bodies. He felt very alone.

37

Mattia didn’t wake his little brothers. Two of them lay side by side, one with his arm around the other’s shoulder like old men consoling each other.

Downstairs, Mattia found Albanese filling a bag in the darkness. He looked up sharply and the glimpse Mattia had of a man alone, absorbed in a task, vanished. Albanese had looked very different in that instant. He had looked relaxed and it made Mattia realise how vigilant the man was the rest of the time.

‘What do you want?’ Albanese asked.

‘I heard a noise.’

‘Huh.’

To Albanese, the boy looked soft and childish in his fatigue, his long feet inturned.

‘Do you want something?’

‘I just heard a noise.’

‘Do you want to do something?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. There’s some coffee there. Drink it then put on some clothes. We’re going out.’

Outside the stars were bright and rigid over the houses. The night wind, cold and direct, blew into Mattia’s eyes. From the direction they turned, Mattia immediately knew where they were going. He thought perhaps he was wrong when Albanese turned another
corner and headed towards the town hall. He stopped at a building beside it, opened it with a key and disappeared. When he returned, he had a jerrycan in his hand. ‘Carry this,’ he said.

Mattia took it. The fuel sloshing inside made it awkward to handle. It banged against his knees as they walked out of Sant’Attilio.

They stopped fifty yards from Angilù Cassini’s house. Mattia set the can down and shook feeling back into his arms. ‘We’re not …’ he whispered. ‘While they’re all asleep.’

‘No, we’re not. Be quiet.’ Cirò put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Mattia couldn’t really see his face. Cirò said, ‘This is just a warning. People don’t give you justice in this life, you know that? You have to go out and take it. Those are my trees. That oil, I had its taste in my mouth for twenty years knowing that someone else was stealing it. Now he won’t have it. First thing, though: the dog.’ Albanese produced a knife from the bag. It was a knife Mattia recognised from his mother’s kitchen. It was a knife he’d fantasised about taking out into the street and using, a boy’s violent fantasies, and now here it was outside in the night, the blade naked under the stars. Albanese handed it to him. Mattia gripped the handle. The weapon felt clever and agile in his hand. Albanese reached into his bag again and pulled out something white. Mattia could see its glow. Again Albanese handed it to him. ‘It’s meat, in the handkerchief. You remember where the dog is? On the left side of the garden. First thing is go in and cut its throat. It should be
asleep. If it is awake, give it the meat and then cut its throat. Then put it on their doorstep. After that, we burn the trees. Will you be quieter with your sandals on or off?’

‘On.’

‘Okay. Go on then.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now. Go on. Be quick.’

‘Okay.’

Mattia walked down the hill with the knife and the meat in his hands. As he reached the gate, he lifted his feet carefully, trying not to make the loose stones squeak beneath him. The house was in front of him, set back behind the trees, dark and sleeping. He went in. For long moments as he crept about, Mattia worried that he wouldn’t even be able to see the dog in the darkness but then he perceived its round shape, curled on the ground. His sweat was cold in the wind. He stepped towards it, closer and closer, until he was near enough to drop onto it. He had his knees on its ribcage, one hand grabbing the muzzle that came awake, wet and sharp with teeth. He got his hand around it and crushed it shut. He reached under with the knife and pulled it up with a short tugging action, the way he’d seen men despatch sheep, and sure enough loose blood started pumping onto the ground while the animal whimpered and hissed, the air going out of it. Its body jerked in a seizure and lay still. He’d done it. He wiped his brow and caught the tang of the dog’s blood on his hands. He cut the rope it was tethered with. That was hard work. It took minutes to saw
through. The dog was heavy as earth when he picked it up, its spine pouring over his hands, hard to gather and control. To get it to the doorstep he had to adopt a bandy-legged, shuffling run. He laid it down.
Here you go, you thief. You see what happens? When you live in my house
.

When he got back to Albanese, the man was delighted. He put both his hands on Mattia’s shoulders and shook him. ‘Good boy. Good boy. Okay, now the next thing.’

Albanese led the way this time. Mattia followed him as he dashed kerosene around and up into the olive trees, starting with those nearest to the gate. When he reached the end, he flipped open a cigarette lighter and lit two sticks. He gave one to Mattia and side by side they walked down the avenue touching flames to the trees, watching fire appear in patches of beautiful liquid blue. It raced up into the oily leaves which started to crackle and burn with flames as sumptuously golden as church decoration. At the gate they dropped the sticks and walked quickly back up the hill.

Albanese was ecstatic. He put his arm around the boy and kissed his head. Mattia felt the man’s strong lips push against his temple and the corner of his eye. Behind them, voices of panic could be heard.

Back at the house, Mattia washed the blood from his arms. Cirò gave him a glass of grappa which felt to Mattia like swallowing the same fire.

Upstairs, the drink, the smell of fire on his skin, the golden burning they’d made in the darkness, for some reason all filled Mattia with intense lust. In bed, he
lay amorously on his front, his head full of images of women’s stocking tops and the neat plump shape of cloth where their underwear fitted tight around their figs. He fell asleep pressing a fierce erection down into the bed.

38

There were footprints of blood in the hallway. Angilù had stumbled over the dog’s soft body, kicked it away and then run back and forth through the puddle that shone black in the firelight.

He’d given up soon anyway. The trees hadn’t properly caught from the hasty splashes of fuel so in the grey dawn light he saw only ugly and stupid damage, scabs of burned twists of shrivelled leaves. Olive trees were tough, used to fierce heat, and there would still be a harvest but that wasn’t the point. This was bad. The dog was very bad. He remembered what it meant like something from his childhood, like a snatch of a song he hadn’t heard for years. Angilù might have only days to live. Every step now was along a precipice.

Angilù dug a hole. It took effort. He felt up his arms every pang of his spade hitting a stone. He took Cesare, whose fur was matted and dull, whose lips were retracted in a snarl, whose tongue hung out, and dropped him in and shovelled over. Earth covering the fur, covering the face. He had to decide what to do. With the Allies here, even if Albanese was whispering into their ignorant ears, there was just a chance of justice. After they’d gone, there was no telling.

39

At breakfast, Albanese sat silent and ignorant. When Mattia tried to smile at him, he registered nothing. His face was heavy and soft, his eyes vague, his grey hair crinkled from the pillow. He fumbled with his coffee and cigarette.

Mattia tore at the dry bread with the teeth in the side of his mouth. Albanese leaned back in his chair, his lips pushed forward, his eyes half closed, somnolent and regal. Mattia asked, ‘What’s America like?’ Across the kitchen he could see his mother’s rounded back tense with attention, listening. Albanese brought his hand to his chin. He thought of the wintry docks and huge iron ships, running men, signals and operations, morphine arriving in olive oil barrels marked with a particular number. That particular line of business had been blessed. The city just wanted more and more and he was the obscure channel by which it flowed into dirty tenements, to clubs and high-class parties. Meanwhile, he himself was clean, a working man. He thought of himself in a thick coat and tweed cap, his breath steaming. He thought of thick meat sandwiches arriving in greasy paper. Around the work there was a dark penumbra of bosses and friends, number running, whores and horses, the nights, the necessary killings. And outside all of it was Cathy, her
white skin and myriad freckles, her rosy nipples, humming as she brushed her hair.

‘America was good,’ he said, ‘very good business. We learned a lot. Maybe I’ll take you there one day. It’s rich, America. You can do well. And I tell you there’s better Sicilian food in New York than there is in Sicily. They have better meat there and good tomatoes from California. Olive oil you have to import. That was one thing I did. I was an importer. I’ll be doing that here too.’

40

Will was pleased to get out onto his motorcycle. The morning with the medical officers had made him gloomy. There was something claustrophobic and hopeless about hearing about the diseases of poverty that they were seeing. It brought into focus what Will had only sensed, made it real and enclosing. Nutritional deficiencies, parasites, diseases and deformities going untreated. At least this part of the island wasn’t malarial, nor were there the poisonings that happened round the sulphur mines. Ripping into the wind, downhill, released Will from this encounter. Probably it had not put him in the right frame of mind to meet a prince. Will was no socialist but the decaying feudalism of this part of the world was distasteful. Surely life could be better organised than princes and peasants? For all their rhetoric of machines and progress, the Fascists seemed to have left Sicily unchanged in this respect.

With the war pounding its way up into Italy, the liberation of mainland Europe underway, Will had started to think of what he might do when it was all over and, somewhat to his surprise, his thoughts had been turning to politics. With his experience, the diplomatic service would obviously have been the ideal fit but he strongly suspected that brown eyes and a middling stature would count against him there as much as in the army. The
foreign service required a particular bearing born of a particular parentage, particular schools. Politics, though, was distinctly possible. He relished the slightly sordid associations of the word. He liked the verb form, also: politicking. Complexity, machination, agility, persuasion.

Finding the Prince’s house did nothing to diminish Will’s sense of the injustices of the place. The house was huge and, as the Prince soon explained, it was inhabited only by himself and his daughter. The other people Will could see were servants and estate workers. The house, then, with its many rooms, its decorated ceilings, ancient portraits and skulking dogs, was a vast store of empty privilege. The thought of a daughter, a single daughter, was intriguing. Will didn’t meet her until later. First, he met the Prince.

Prince Adriano was relatively tall for a Sicilian and he spoke with a kind of delighted gaiety that Will had noticed in some educated foreigners when they were addressing Englishmen. They thrilled to converse with a representative of the Empire, Dickens, Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Part of the pleasure seemed to lie in their acting English also, adapting their mannerisms, being clipped and reserved, and dissembling their enjoyment of the whole thing. The pleasure appeared in compacted smiles; it shone in their eyes.

The Prince was affable, meeting Will in a large vestibule. Behind him a large staircase climbed towards the light of a window. ‘I’m very pleased we got the English,’ he said. ‘This is the last outpost, no? Everything west is American.’