Under the Rose Page 15

  ‘Of course she hasn’t a hope,’ you said. ‘A mother who leaves her husband has no rights at all.’

  ‘But surely you’, I asked, ‘are on her side.’ In view of your regard for motherhood, I thought you might at least be on the fence.

  ‘Me? No. Why? If she made a bad wife, she’d make a bad mother.’

  ‘How do you know she was a bad wife? Because she is an American?’

  You dodged that one. Though you mayn’t care for foreigners, you probably rate Sicilians a bit below them.

  ‘A woman’, you said, ‘who can’t make a success of her marriage will never make one of child-rearing. A woman’s first obligation is to her family. No matter what her husband does, she must work to keep it together. Your American friend made rather a mess of that, didn’t she?’ You shrugged.

  The argument dwindled off. I forget the rest but have a strong image of you with your freshly highlit hair, bolt upright on our couch: a stiff old mummy decked in the pride of matriarchy and certitude. When you left, Carlo said I had been disagreeable. I denied this.

  ‘She knows Mary-Lou is a friend of mine. She needn’t have sounded so pleased.’

  ‘It’s a matter of principle with her.’

  ‘Well I’, I told him, ‘have principles, too. I think I was forbearing.’

  I went into the kitchen. I’m not domestic. I’ve gone through that phase. However, this year, I had made an effort and cooked a number of plum-puddings. Plum-pudding is one of the few English dishes foreigners like and I was going to serve one at Christmas, one at New Year and a third at Twelfth Night. The rest were for giving away. For the honour of old England I had gone to a lot of trouble, taking no short-cuts and making everything as traditional and genuine as possible. There were eight altogether ranged on the shelf in their cloth-covered bowls and I was looking at them now, realizing that I’d forgotten to give you yours to take with you. Suddenly, Carlo came charging into the kitchen. He had obviously been smouldering blackly for some minutes. The Mary-Lou case is the sort that can upset him badly. In a calm moment he would be totally on Mary-Lou’s side and indignant at the anomalies of Italian justice. But let a foreigner – me – express that indignation first and Carlo can do an about-face in no time at all. Seeing me absorbed in admiration of my plum-puddings, he put up his fist and swept all eight of them from the shelf. Two broke. The cloth cover came off another so that it spilled its contents. Five were intact. He began kicking at these.

  ‘Stop! Carlo!’ I caught his shirt, pulling him away from my last puddings. He pulled backwards and the shirt tore. I clawed at it some more. It was silk, especially made for him in London and he was proud of it.

  He began banging my head against the wall. I reached for his balls but he caught my elbows….

  No need to give you a blow-by-blow account. As usual, I was left, when he finally stormed out of the door, with bruises, a headache, a torn dress, no plum-puddings and a strong sense of injustice. He came back in a couple of hours and apologized, wept, accused himself – and you – said … What does it matter what he said? My nose was swollen and stayed that way for a week. My eyes had begun to have a permanent puff. Sooner or later he might disfigure me and what I resented and could not forgive was the permanent disparity between us, the superior muscle which he could use even when he was wrong and knew it. But – I didn’t want to leave. There was my recurrent dilemma and we both had bad tempers.

  I suspect – I know – that your favourite image of Carlo is as Mamma’s little-boy in his First Communion photograph: about three feet high, squared shoulders, milk-toothy smile, ‘English-tailored’ suit and great white rosette. No matter what I tell you, about the Carlo of today, you will close your eyes, shrink him back to manageable proportions and present him with that satin rosette for innocence. If innocence means ignorance of other people’s needs, then Carlo certainly gets that rosette. If it means – as my dictionary would have it – ‘guileless or not injurious’, he doesn’t. Carlo’s guilelessness is a self-deceiving act: guile camouflaging itself.

  Shall I tell you more about our rows? They always started for no reason but the root-reason: resentment-left-from-the-row-before and ended with Carlo sitting on my chest weeping over the damage done to me and proclaiming his innocence.

  ‘Una, you know I can’t control myself when I get started. Why do you provoke me?’

  ‘What’s provocation?’

  ‘Look at the state your face is in! Your looks are being ruined. Una, don’t try to tangle with me! I beg you. Look, I try to hold myself in. I do hold myself back. You know that! Christ, if I were to let myself go I’d have killed you ten times over. I’m stronger than you, you silly bitch. Madonna Santa! You’ll have to hide in the house for a week now or people will think I’m an animal! Che figura! Una, look at your neck! And your eye! Do you realize I could blind you? Why do you do this to us? Una? Why?’

  Carlo wept a bit, caressed me a bit, blew his nose and began to talk again.

  ‘Your trouble’, said Carlo, ‘is that you’re not sure of yourself as a woman. You’re afraid to let yourself be womanly. But womanliness is a wonderful thing! Una, Una,’ his fingers promenaded my neck, ‘why do you look so ironic? Irony is the weapon of the timid, do you know that? Of the people who are afraid of the great – the simple things in life!’ He had an erection. ‘Close your eyes,’ he whispered.

  I did for a minute; then I opened them. Carlo had closed his. He was lying on his back, his head a piece of forgotten jetsam, his hips working, his teeth bared, laughing only in the sense that we sometimes say an animal ‘laughs’. A line of verse swam into my head: ‘Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the foam.’

  ‘Ha!’ Carlo crowed. ‘You’re liking it! Aren’t you? Aren’t you? You can’t help yourself, can you? Donna, sei troppo donna! Ha-aaagh!’

  After making love – not right after but in, say, three-quarters of an hour – Carlo tended to become testy, even truculent. He may have felt he needn’t be pleasant any longer since he wouldn’t need me again that day or he may have held some sort of grudge against me: a sense perhaps of loss. He usually began by taking back his earlier apologies.

  ‘The truth of it is you’re a masochist. You like me to hit you. What’s more you know it gives you an advantage by making me feel bad. My mother always said …’

  ‘Your mother …’

  ‘Don’t say a word against la Mamma! She sees through you all right. It takes one woman to see through another!’

  ‘If only she would keep out of our affairs! If only she would shut …’

  ‘If you shut up we wouldn’t have any problems. Women aren’t meant to argue with men. Look, Una, in the natural world every animal has its weapon. Some are passive. Take the skunk or the hedgehog or the snail …’

  ‘Pleasant company. Come on, you stupid bastard. Get up off my chest and get me a drink.’

  We’d probably laugh then and make up, but peace was precarious. Carlo was alert to the distinction between humouring and submission. He hated to be laughed at. He would try to laugh back but usually the laugh persisted until it became a bellow.

  ‘Sense of humour,’ he would begin in an amused voice. ‘The great British invention: weapon of the inarticulate. When in doubt, laugh. It covers a multitude, doesn’t it? Especially it covers snobbery, because one always laughs down, vero? One laughs at the inferior, the mildly grotesque! No proof of one’s own superiority is needed. The laugh does it all: Haha, haha, ha!’ He rushed at me suddenly. ‘Haha!’ he howled.

  ‘You’re hurting me again!’

  ‘Laugh while I’m hurting you. Let’s see the sense of humour working while I hurt you! Mmm? Not so easy? Why don’t you laugh!’

  ‘I’m waiting for you to cry.’

  ‘Me? Cry?’

  ‘Didn’t you know you always do? It’s your gimmick. I laugh. You cry. Tears,’ I would howl, for by now he would be twisting my arm or pulling out handfuls of my hair, ‘tears prove, ha, sensibility. Sto
ppit, you bastard! You’re a repentance addict,’ I yelled, ‘you got hooked at the time of your First Communion when they gave you that nice white rosette. Stop, you’re breaking my arm.’

  And so on. Only the venue changed. Once we fought in the bathroom of a party in Florence where Carlo thought I had been flirting with a bearded hippy and I got so messed up that Carlo had to bribe the hired help to smuggle us out at the back. Another time when we were fighting in one of the backstreets of Volterra – cowboy-style we had left a trattoria to finish things outside – a policeman challenged us. Carlo explained that he was my husband and merely arranging his domestic troubles in the only way that seemed to work. The policeman was welcome to see our identity cards if he wished. The policeman did. He may have thought I was a whore or Carlo a molester of women. However, when he saw the cards, he agreed with some embarrassment – Southern gallantry may have been a touch uncomfortable – that, yes, a husband did, in effect, have certain rights, though not exaggerated ones nowadays – ‘Siamo un popolo civile’ – such matters were better settled within the family domicile, but the law was chary of … well, yes … Good evening Signor Dottore, Signora … He retreated.

  *

  Carlo lies dead.

  I hit him too hard. I finally hit him and, in spite of being wrapped in three of his own old socks, the piece of lead piping smashed his skull. Maybe his skull was one of those freak ones: paper-thin. Some English literary figure, I forget which, fell backwards off his chair and cracked his skull and died. The autopsy revealed that the bone had been so thin that the slightest tap could have killed him at any point in his life. Maybe Carlo’s too was paper-thin? But will the Italian police find this out? Will they consider it an attenuating circumstance?

  ‘Commissario’ – should I say brigadiere? What are they called? What? Maresciallo perhaps? – ‘I swear I never meant to kill him.’

  The Commissario has heard that one before.

  Carlo lies limp, blood oozing thickishly through the roots of his hair. The neighbours crowd in: all women at this hour. They wear housecoats or else carry string-bags full of green-groceries and udder-shaped flasks for oil. They stare at the unnatural foreign woman who has killed such a fine man, such a decent, good-looking stud lost now forever to their timid lusts.

  ‘Gesummaria!’

  ‘Che strage!’

  I could say it was passion. Passion-crimes are respected in Italy, leniently punished. Jealousy? Say he was sleeping with one of the neighbours. Which? They all look ready for it: tumid, womanly women. It might even be true. They’d deny it, though, band together, make a liar of me. And then: are Englishwomen allowed passion? Madness more likely: pazza inglese, mad Englishwoman. The photographers are being let in. Flash. Shall I look mad? Throw myself on the corpse? Cry, scream? No. Close my eyes. It was passion. It was. Not their sort, perhaps, but passion, yes. I could have left if I had not been so possessive: just said, ‘Good-bye, Carlo, sorry it didn’t work out better. I shall remember you fondly.’ He’d have found someone else. The shit! Stronzo! This way he’s mine – for all he’s worth. Cut off his head, shall I, and plant it in a pot of basil? A bit disgusting really. There’s no death penalty in Italy but they have mediaeval prison conditions. I’ve read about them: scandalous. How shall I get out of this? The policeman is writing his verbale. Words from the crime columns of the evening papers agglomerate like flies on jam: black flies attracted by the jammy blood of Carlo. L’imputata, that’s me: the accused. But I have accused myself. I rang the police. Will that count in my favour? I should have a lawyer. Don’t say another word until I get one. The moment I put down the phone I started bashing myself up, trying to leave convincing bruises. I threw myself against furniture, beat myself black and blue with a belt – beautiful variegated welts. I wanted to have a black eye but I hadn’t the nerve. (Try punching yourself in the eye!)

  ‘We were having a fight, Signor Commissario. I reached for something, I didn’t know what, to hit him with. I was mad, blinded with pain, not thinking, Signor Commissario! He was much stronger than I!’ Look at my bruises, my torn hair, my dress in ribbons – pity about that eye! ‘It turned out to be the meat mallet!’ (As you might imagine I’d got rid of the bits of lead piping. Down the well.) ‘Poor Carlo, I never thought … I bought that mallet only a month ago. It’s made of boxwood. I got it to flatten veal so as to make thin, thin veal scallops for him, cooked with sage the way he liked them. In oil….’ Distraught wife! ‘How could I imagine. I didn’t even aim, Signor Commissario! He was twisting my other arm. Look at the bruises! And then … it happened before I knew it. How could I … Poor, poor Carlo went down like a sack of potatoes!’ Not a good simile. Stop. Cry a bit.

  Clever Una did remember to smarm a little of Carlo’s bloody hair on the mallet. Oh, we have all read the crime columns. La cronaca nera. But do they tell all? I’m manic. Maybe they will find me mad? I regret Carlo’s death but less – considerably less – than the loss of Carlo alive. The crime of passion is the meanest of all: ungenerous, grasping, crime of the weak and the unloved. It should be doubly punished, not less. My blood fizzles in my veins. Murder exhilarates. Power thrills. Meanwhile I am afraid. And sorry. All at once. I have an urge to talk. Mustn’t talk, might incriminate myself. Beware. Everything I say may be written down and used as evidence. Twenty years I might get for this. L’ergastolo. And the one I really want to tell about it all is Carlo, Carlo, Carlo….

  ‘Una, wake up! You’re shouting!’

  Carlo is shaking me, laughing at me.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Una? You’re completely bonkers! Shouting in your sleep! Do you know what you shouted: “Pazza inglese!” Honestly!’ He laughs witlessly. The light bulb hangs nakedly over our double bed. For a year I have been promising to make a Victorian-type ruffled lace shade for it and never did. Naturally. Because I never do anything, do I? I only dream of doing. Carlo is still shaking me even though I am awake. He thinks it very funny that I should talk in my sleep. He has a smug, placid look.

  ‘You were talking about yourself, weren’t you? Calling yourself the mad Englishwoman? Pazza inglese!’ He laughs. ‘Poor Una, poverina, va!’ He has a superior look. His superiority sticks in my craw.

  I pull away from him, leap up, clutch the flex by which the bulb hangs, yank it out of the ceiling and smash the hot bulb down on Carlo’s head. There is a satisfying smashing sound and we are in the dark. Have I killed him? What if his skull …? But no, he has leaped on me, all sweaty thirteen stone of him, he’s squeezing my throat and rolling me on a sheet covered with smashed glass. My eyes dazzle from the after-glare of the bulb. I try to scream but he’s strangling me.

  ‘You mad bloody bitch! Mad is right. I could kill you. DO YOU REALIZE THAT?’

  He lets go. I am choking. My body is scratched all over by the glass and there is no light. I crawl into the bathroom and vomit, then sit, shivering on the lavatory. Mindless.

  I look at the mirror. There are bruises on my throat. Fresh bruises. They will get more dramatic. My back and thighs are streaked with blood from the glass. Now would be the time to show myself. Signor Commissario…. Ah no! No more fantasy. There does lie the way to madness. The weak fantasize and resign themselves.

  Coldly, deliberately and with no sense of release, I take out the piece of lead piping that I keep in the lavatory cistern, dry it in a towel and use it to smash the bathroom mirror in which I have just been contemplating myself. It is six feet square and less than a year old. Smash! The blow is not on a level with murder but is at least a real act. I leave the piping in the washbasin and go to sleep in the spare room.

  *

  You see, Signora, I was obsessed. I had him, as the French say, in my skin. Like a burr. His image was stuck in the folds of my brain.

  You can’t live on sex and the memory and expectation of it but, once we came to Volterra, there was little else for me to do. Mine was worse than a harem-life. Harems have other women in them.

  Men used to follow
me in the streets. I had that free, foreign look. They had that furtive Italian disease of desire. Their pockets bulged as they fingered their genitalia – Americans call this ‘playing pocket-pool’ – and their trousers were always too tight. Thin gabardine suits covered but outlined their flesh.

  ‘Do you like Italy?’ they hissed. ‘Do you like Italian men?’

  ‘No.’

  I did not like Italian or any other category of men. I was riveted by a resentful passion to one man. I resented his violence, also his having filled my mind with trivia, interrupted my independent life and drawn me into the game of playing house. I had enjoyed this while it was novel, never seeing the drudgery in it. During my first months with Carlo – in Rome before we got married – I willingly spent hours making salads which were edible mosaics and got up at seven to go marketing. Every act was pleasurable. It was as if some bolt had been adjusted in my body heightening all my senses. I could not tell whether the agency was sex with Carlo or swimming at Fregene or listening to a baroque concert in some old courtyard. Or even the food? I was seduced by basil smells and the gibbous gleam on an egg-plant. That summer went by in a welter of animal gratification. I don’t think I read a book. I certainly never bought a newspaper. My mind slept and while it did I contracted for a life which left it little scope.

  As an Italian, you can never experience that first stultifying impact of Italy and its pleasures. You know them too well: their techniques, how to dose them and how to make them tick. You are amused by the speed with which we succumb. L’arte della vita, that self-congratulatory phrase, celebrates your adroitness at dealing with the body. ‘Vi piace l’Italia?’ you ask. ‘Do you like our country?’ The question is pure rhetoric. You know we do, and our liking is often so gluttonous that you manage to feel spiritually superior as well. Our later dissatisfactions escape you or you put them down to a dyspeptic inability to live. To Puritanism. OK. The word is as good as another. Its residue in me is a need for balance: a need to think as well as feel, to structure my life. I will not spend it plotting the best ways to serve the senses and making endless trips to little knitting women and trimming women and little men in the hills who can sell me demijohns of unadulterated olive oil or wine or rounds of pecorino. I know all this is necessary if food and clothes are to be exquisite. But the price is too high. I choose against l’arte della vita. From now on I shall buy my dresses ready-made and nobody in England will notice that the quarter-inch dip of my left shoulder has not been countered by an especially constructed pad. I shall forget the distinction between good and less good oil. I renounce a repetition of that summer with Carlo: sensual ecstasy, the incandescent pinnacle of what Italy has to give. I tear myself away from him while I still want him – and I don’t see Carlo as a hook on which to hang sensations. I love him. Himself. His every tic and inch of flesh is photographed on my retina. Possessively. Tenderly. With lust. But he can’t be separated from the life here – he wouldn’t come with me and, if he did, it wouldn’t work. My feeling for him has turned poisonous. I have to go and let him go.