Tuscan Rose (31 page)

Antonio answered the door instead of Ylenia. He was wearing a dressing-gown over his suit and gave a start when he saw Rosa.

‘My God! It’s freezing tonight. What are you doing here?’ he said, pulling her inside the foyer. He turned pale when he saw the wild look on her face. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Sibilla!’ Rosa cried, collapsing to her knees.

Antonio’s eyes grew wide. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened to Sibilla?’

The tears Rosa had been forcing down burst out from her. ‘Help us! Antonio! Oh God! Please help us!’

Rosa did not take her eyes off Sibilla that critical night in the clinic. They were alone together in the isolation room, with a nurse coming every half-hour to check Sibilla’s vital signs. Rosa did not allow herself to think about what had happened in the last few hours. All her mental efforts were spent on prayers for her daughter. She did not want to remember the humiliated expression on Luciano’s face when Antonio presented his Fascist Party card to the admissions nurse and handed over a wad of bills. ‘Anything she needs,’ he had said. ‘Anything at all, I will pay for it.’

Rosa would never intentionally hurt Luciano, but all she could think about was saving Sibilla.

Only Rosa was allowed to stay with her, everyone else was sent away. The child fell unconscious after the serum was administered. Each time her daughter’s condition deteriorated, Rosa felt part of
herself being torn away. Yet, by some miracle, Sibilla was still breathing the next morning.

Antonio arrived and organised for a cot bed to be brought for Rosa to sleep on, and told her that he would ring a friend of his in Rome who was a children’s specialist to see if there was anything else that could be done. ‘Luciano and the others are waiting outside the clinic,’ he said. ‘They are worried senseless, but it’s better they don’t come in. It might jeopardise Sibilla’s treatment. The head doctor is an ardent fascist.’

Sibilla’s condition worsened in the afternoon. Her closed eyelids were swollen and her mouth was limp. The situation continued with minor improvements followed by deteriorations for another week.

‘I’m afraid I can’t let you stay overnight again,’ the nurse told Rosa. ‘It’s against the regulations. Your husband persuaded us to bend them for you, but we’ve done it for as long as we can. You’ll have to go home and come back in the morning.’

Rosa understood that by ‘husband’ the nurse meant Antonio. He came every day to the clinic, taking back news of Sibilla’s progress to Luciano and his family. He brought soup for Rosa to eat. ‘Ylenia made it for you. You have to stay strong for Sibilla,’ he told her. ‘You can’t let yourself waste away.’ Then he would stay and make sure that she ate it. Rosa did so to please him, not because she was hungry. She remembered what she had said to Luciano about Antonio:
He loves her. He loves Sibilla.
Yes, but Antonio also loves me, Rosa realised. She saw it in the way he cared for her. Somewhere, somehow, the affections he had held for Signora Visconti had transferred to her. His proposal had not been a rescue mission at all.

When Rosa came home each day from the clinic, she and Luciano collapsed into each other’s arms but were usually too distressed to speak much. What could they say? Rosa couldn’t think clearly enough to talk about anything. Her entire mind was filled with thoughts of Sibilla.

‘You must hate me,’ Luciano said once, his eyes brimming with pain. ‘If I hadn’t used the money…’

Rosa put her fingers to his lips and shook her head. ‘It was
our
decision…and in the end, Sibilla received the serum. It’s up to God now.’

The Montagnanis didn’t have a telephone and Rosa dreaded going to the clinic each morning knowing that she might be greeted with the news that Sibilla had perished overnight. Although Sibilla was conscious again and eating small amounts of gruel, the doctor told Rosa that she was still in danger. But Rosa refused to give up hope.

‘Come on, my little one,’ she whispered to her daughter, stroking her cheek. ‘Mamma wants to take you home.’

Each day on her way back from the clinic, Rosa stopped at a church to light a candle. She would sit in the silence and pray, never sure if the peace she felt came from faith or weariness.

On the fifteenth morning of Sibilla’s illness, Rosa had a dream. She was woken by a bright light. She climbed out of bed and followed it down a dark corridor with a door at the end of it. The door slowly swung open. On the other side was Sibilla in the arms of angel. The angel had its wings tucked behind its back and cradled Sibilla, who was happy and laughing. The light grew stronger and Rosa woke up. It was already nine o’clock in the morning. She had overslept. Luciano left for work at five o’clock and would have thought that too early to wake her.

Rosa hurriedly dressed and caught the tram to the clinic. While she had been dreaming, she had felt peace. But now she was panicked. Why an angel? Had Sibilla passed away?

There wasn’t anyone at the clinic’s reception desk. Rosa ran straight up the stairs. When she entered the room where Sibilla had been staying, her daughter wasn’t there. The sheets had been stripped from the bed. Rosa ran back into the corridor. Her heart stopped when she saw a trolley with a body lying on it covered with a sheet. The body was small: its feet only reached part of the way down the trolley. The blood drained from Rosa’s face.
Help
me to be strong, help me to trust,
she prayed, her legs shaking beneath her. With a trembling hand, she tugged back the sheet. A little boy with a halo of blond hair lay before her. His skin was mottled but he looked at rest, as if he were sleeping. Rosa recognised him as the boy who had fallen from his bicycle and hit his head. He had been alive the day before, but now his voice and presence were lost to his family forever. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead before covering him again.

‘Your daughter is here, Signora Parigi.’

Rosa turned to see the matron standing at the end of the corridor. She was pointing to the door next to her.

Rosa’s feet barely touched the floor. She ran to the room the matron indicated. Sibilla was sitting up in bed. She was pale but she wasn’t struggling to breathe. She was nibbling at a plum that she held in her hand. When she saw Rosa, her face broke into a smile.

‘Head don’t hurt, Mamma,’ she said.

Rosa threw her arms around her daughter and wept.

Rosa stopped at the church on her way home. She sat in the pew, staring at the statue of Christ. The nagging thought that she had managed to suppress during the crisis of Sibilla’s illness now demanded her attention. She could no longer avoid what was obvious: her love for Luciano took her one way, but her love for Sibilla and her duty to her daughter’s welfare pulled her another. She had to think of Sibilla and the sort of life into which she would be leading her if she stayed with Luciano. He was called to a greater cause and, although he would never say it, she and Sibilla were a weight holding him back. Rosa remembered the words the Badessa had said to her when she was leaving the convent:
To live this life you must be called to it
…Luciano loved them but he was no more suited to being an ordinary family man than Rosa was to being a nun. He couldn’t turn away from what God had designated him to do. It was as much a part of him as Rosa’s ability to see the source of things was of her.

Rosa’s mind drifted to Antonio. He had offered her marriage and she had refused it because her heart belonged to Luciano. Had she given any thought to what was best for Sibilla? Antonio could give her daughter a warm home and a good education. Ballet lessons, art lessons, beautiful clothes. It could all be hers. What could Rosa give her if she stayed with Luciano? Love alone would not have saved Sibilla from meningitis.

Rosa sensed someone standing next to her. She looked up to see Luciano.

‘I thought I would find you here,’ he said, kneeling beside her. ‘Antonio told me that Sibilla has passed the worst danger.’

Rosa stared at her hands. She was afraid to look at Luciano. She was afraid of what she might see in his eyes—or what he might see in hers.

‘I didn’t know he had proposed to you,’ said Luciano softly. ‘You didn’t tell me that. He’s a good man. We had a long talk. It seems you told him about your past and he’s not put off by that.’

‘Stop!’ said Rosa.

With Luciano so near to her, his familiar arm pressed against hers, she forgot everything she had been considering. She
loved
him. She
needed
him. She was afraid of what he was going to say because she knew it was what she had been thinking. Which is easier to bear, Rosa wondered, the truth or lies?

‘Will you light a candle for me, Rosa?’ Luciano asked. ‘Will you light a candle and pray for the cause I am pledged to?’

Rosa felt his eyes on her but she refused to meet his gaze. The aching in her chest was going to kill her. Maybe one day all that had happened would make sense and she would be able to see it from a detached point of view. But not today. There were no words for the agony she felt.

‘What are you saying, Luciano?’ she asked, finally mustering the courage. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I
taly, relive the glories of Rome! Empire for Italy!’ the announcer bellowed from the radio in Geppetto’s toy store on Via della Vigna Nuova. It was 1935, and Mussolini had just announced that the Italian army had invaded Abyssinia.

Rosa, who had been shopping for gifts for her twin sons, was jostled by customers cheering and embracing each other. The shopkeeper, a Pinocchio puppet in hand, danced a jig on the countertop. Rosa wondered how these people could be so happy when the war would result in the starvation of thousands of children. Or didn’t that matter because it wouldn’t be
their
children who would die? Rosa was ashamed of her countrymen. How could they call themselves ‘civilised’ and attack a defenceless nation? Abyssinia had no planes or anti-aircraft weapons. It could barely feed its own people.

On her way to Via Tornabuoni, Rosa stopped at an English teahouse. The story of Italy’s attack on Abyssinia was reported differently in the British newspapers. The British condemned Italy for not declaring war before attacking and for bombing hospitals. Rosa looked at the picture of the barefoot Abyssinian soldiers on the cover of
The Times
and felt nauseated. The League of Nations had condemned Italy as an aggressor, and in truth Mussolini could have
developed Abyssinia without conquering it. The British had tried to find a peaceful solution to Mussolini’s demands, offering a strip of their own territory to Abyssinia to give it access to a port in return for ceding some land to Italy. But Mussolini was not looking for peaceful solutions. He had defined the ‘Fascist State’ as ‘a wish for power and domination’. He wanted war, as Luciano had warned.

Rosa looked around the café. The patrons were fewer than they had been the previous month. The British were nervous. Mussolini was using the press to incite Italians against them because of their government’s opposition to his expansionist policies. Most of the tourists had left and many of the expatriates were packing up. It seemed only the old ladies with no homes or families to return to in England were staying on. Italy had been their home for years and they could not leave it, no matter how feelings were turning against them.

Rosa paid for her tea and cake, filled with a sudden urge to rush home and embrace her children. The twins were in the care of Giuseppina, who had stayed on after Nonno’s death. They had just started saying concrete words like ‘Dog!’ and ‘Cat!’; and Sibilla had taken to singing them lullabies. Rosa trembled to think her children’s safe world could be shattered by war. Why couldn’t Mussolini concern himself with Italy’s internal problems rather than dragging the country into conflict?

Eager as she was to get home, Rosa went to the furniture shop first. She stood at the door to the office a moment, watching Antonio reconciling invoices. She was overcome by the same tenderness towards him that she experienced on those mornings when she awoke to find his cheek pressed to hers.

‘Did you hear the news?’ she asked him.

Antonio looked up from his work and smiled. ‘What news?’

‘About Italy attacking Abyssinia. Everyone in the toy store cheered.’

Antonio leaned back in his chair and shrugged. ‘Mussolini has made this nation stupid. Do they really think this is empire building? All that’s going to happen now is the League of Nations
will impose economic sanctions against us. Perhaps people won’t cheer so much when they haven’t food to put on the table.’

He stood and took Rosa’s parcels from her before wrapping his arms around her shoulders. ‘We can’t worry about what we can’t fix,’ he said, kissing her on the top of her head. Then, glancing at his watch, he said, ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Let’s go back and see what our angels have been up to.’

The nursery in Rosa and Antonio’s apartment was Nonno’s former bedroom. The heavy teak furniture had been replaced by two cream-painted cots, a nursery table and a chest of drawers made of maple wood. On one of the walls, Rosa had painted an olive tree with branches reaching to the ceiling. On another wall hung Nonno’s horseshoe-shaped mirror and cowboy hat. Rosa loved the room and was sure that Nonno, who had died three months before the twins were born, would have approved of it too. ‘Your marrying my son is the best thing that’s ever happened in my life—or his!’ he had told Rosa.

‘Ah, here are Mamma and Babbo,’ Giuseppina said when Rosa and Antonio entered. She stood up, her cheeks pink and her laugh lines dancing on her face.

The twins were playing with their rubber train set on the floor, assisted by Ambrosio, who was chewing on the toy engineer. Lorenzo, the firstborn of the two, tried to stand but fell on his bottom, narrowly missing Allegra who was asleep next to him. Lorenzo had been named after Nonno. The second-born twin, Giorgio, had been given Antonio’s middle name because there was no known maternal grandfather to name him after.

Lorenzo, who was fair like his father, started to cry. Rosa was surprised. He was usually more adventurous than his tawny-skinned brother and the fall would have been more of a surprise than painful. Giorgio tried to comfort his brother by offering his thumb, but when it was rejected began to cry himself.

‘Ah!’ said Antonio, covering his ears in mock anguish. ‘What’s happened to my sons’ happy dispositions?’

‘Here,’ said Sibilla, standing up from the table where she had been drawing. She rushed to the twins to kiss them. ‘I will make it better.’ Her medicine worked. The twins stopped their tears and turned their attention back to their trains.

Rosa embraced and kissed each of the children. She pulled Sibilla onto her lap and they watched together what the twins were doing. Antonio got down on all fours and joined in with the boys’ play, imitating the noise of a steam engine while pushing the toy along. The twins squealed with delight.

‘I drew you and Babbo,’ said Sibilla, reaching for her sketchbook and showing it to Rosa.

The picture showed Rosa in profile and Antonio facing forward. It was unusual for a child as young as Sibilla to draw figures in different orientations and with good proportions, but it seemed to Rosa that her daughter was advanced for her age in every way. She was self-disciplined and provided quick answers to questions. She was also showing an unusual ability for music.

‘When I play the flute, Sibilla will hum along with me,’ Rosa had told Antonio. ‘She keeps time well and rhythmically.’

Rosa smoothed Sibilla’s ebony hair. It was like silk between her fingers. Sibilla was so extraordinarily beautiful that people would often stop them in the street to admire her. They would study Rosa and Antonio, well dressed and good-looking, but the question on their faces was the one Rosa asked herself: where did such luminescent beauty come from? Certainly not from Osvaldo.

Sibilla slipped off Rosa’s lap and went to show Antonio her picture.

‘It’s beautiful, darling,’ he said. ‘You’ve made me so handsome.’

‘You are handsome,’ she replied, tossing her head.

She knew that she had Antonio wrapped around her finger and that he couldn’t resist her requests for anything.

‘Sibilla’s usually charming,’ Giuseppina had confided in Rosa and Antonio when they’d asked her one day about the children’s behaviour. ‘But sometimes she can be haughty if she wants something and she’s not getting it.’

Antonio had laughed it off as a stage in Sibilla’s development. But Rosa had seen that characteristic too and it disturbed her. The haughtiness reminded her of the Marchesa Scarfiotti.

Ylenia walked into the room. ‘I am wondering if you and Signor Parigi wish to have lunch on the terrace today?’ she asked Rosa. ‘The weather is beautiful. The children can eat here.’

Antonio struggled up from his undignified position. But once he was standing, he caught sight of the expression on his sons’ faces: they were crestfallen because he had stopped playing.

‘I think we might all eat in the nursery today, thank you, Ylenia,’ Antonio said.

Rosa loved moments like these, when everyone was together. It was a peaceful and happy life. But the uneasiness she had felt on hearing the announcement of the attack on Abyssinia prickled her again. Dreams were fragile and dreamers woke up. Rosa closed her eyes, afraid that if she loved too much she might lose it all.

Antonio had been right when he predicted that the members of the League of Nations would impose sanctions against Italy for its unprovoked attack on Abyssinia. By spring the lire had devalued and the gold reserves in the Bank of Italy were falling. To help the reserves and to encourage patriotism, Mussolini called on the people of Italy to sacrifice their wedding rings for the national cause. He termed it ‘the Day of Faith’. Citizens were to take their rings to depots in the cities, towns and villages all over the country. Rosa and Antonio did not intend to help Mussolini kill innocent people. Rosa had read in the English press that the Italian military were defying international conventions of war and using mustard gas. She wept when she read the descriptions of blinded and burnt soldiers lying on the battlefield for hours, dying from the effects of poison gas, with no medical assistance because the Red Cross ambulances and hospitals were being targeted by the Italian airforce. ‘The shame!’ she cried. ‘The shame!’

When the Day of Faith came the skies opened and it poured with rain. But nature’s disapproval did not deter women from
turning out in their thousands from seven o’clock in the morning until late in the evening to offer their wedding rings and other items of gold. Rosa and Antonio were on their way to an estate sale when they saw the lines of women outside the
comune.
They were middle- and working-class women, but the radio that morning had announced that the Queen of Italy, the princesses, and Mussolini’s wife and daughter were all offering their rings. The churches and even the synagogues played the
Giovinezza
and called on women to donate their rings after the service.

Rosa heard a fishmonger greet a butcher with: ‘To whom does Abyssinia belong?’

‘To us! To us!’ the butcher shouted enthusiastically, wiping his hands on his bloodied apron.

‘It’s like a football game to them,’ Antonio whispered to Rosa.

While Rosa and Antonio had not donated their rings to the cause, they had taken them off and put them in the safe in their apartment. While they didn’t agree with what was happening, it wasn’t wise to openly oppose it. The patriotic zeal had been so worked up that things could go badly for anyone who questioned it.

‘Do not allow Italy’s march to victory to be hampered,’ a Blackshirt volunteer was shouting through a megaphone outside a school where wedding rings were being collected. ‘We will defeat the siege.’

The rain let up for a moment and Rosa caught sight of Signora Visconti coming out of the school. She was dismayed to see her husband’s former paramour. Rosa was fashionable these days in her tailored clothes and with her hair centre-parted and swept back into an array of curls pinned into place at the nape of her neck. She even had a collection of pretty hats, including a flamingo pink one with silk roses on the brim. But Signora Visconti’s beauty was as overwhelming as Sibilla’s. With her peaked eyebrows, snood hat and golden skin, Signora Visconti looked as though her elegance needed no effort at all.

Rosa had seen Signora Visconti a few months earlier, when she was out walking with the children and Giuseppina. Signora Visconti
had stepped in front of Rosa to block her way and her eyes had blazed with such anger that Rosa was frightened. Then the expression on that hard and beautiful face had changed to contempt and the woman had turned and walked away. Rosa had understood what Signora Visconti was telling her: You are his child-bearer but I am his great love.

Now, Signora Visconti caught sight of Antonio and fixed her eyes on him, but he took Rosa’s arm and kept walking. He didn’t say anything to Rosa even when they were several streets away.

‘Antonio?’ she ventured.

He looked at her. ‘Yes?’

‘Did you see Signora Visconti?’

‘Yes.’

Rosa tried to read her husband’s face. Did he still think of Signora Visconti? Perhaps when he was up late reading and Rosa had already gone to bed? Or when he walked to the shop in the morning? Antonio’s lips pinched. Rosa waited, and when she saw her husband didn’t intend to comment further, she asked, ‘Are you all right?’

Antonio grimaced. ‘I had no idea she was such a fascist.’

Rosa’s moment of insecurity passed and she laughed at Antonio’s wry comment. She wondered why she needed her husband’s reassurance when he never seemed to think of Signora Visconti at all. Was it her own ‘unfaithfulness’ she was afraid of? While Rosa loved and respected Antonio, she had never forgotten Luciano. He still held a place in her heart.

One afternoon in spring the following year, Rosa was in the vicinity of the Duomo and decided to go inside to light her daily candle for Luciano. She stood in the cathedral’s cavernous Gothic interior and stared up at the frescoes of the Last Judgement on the interior of the dome. It was like looking up into heaven. She lit a candle and took a place in a pew to pray and contemplate. Rosa didn’t believe in the political church. But she did believe in God. He was the only one who could save the Italian people from their folly.

While she was praying, Rosa noticed a woman pass by. There was something about her that was familiar. When the woman knelt down, Rosa caught sight of her elegant profile and the gold flecks in her hair under her veil.

‘Orietta?’

The woman turned and Rosa’s heart lifted at the sight of her old friend. Orietta returned Rosa’s smile and indicated that they should move out to the aisle so as not to disturb the other worshippers.

‘You are so beautiful,’ said Orietta, embracing Rosa with genuine warmth.

Rosa was moved by the show of affection. She had not kept in contact with Luciano’s family after she and Antonio had married and she had felt the loss deeply.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ she asked Orietta.

‘I’m still working at the patisserie.’ Orietta studied Rosa, guessing the next question on her mind. ‘My brothers are fighting in Spain.’