Trio Read online

  Standing in the doorway of the main house was a woman in an apron, who had obviously been observing their arrival up the winding path. Sandrina greeted them with a welcoming smile and in a deep slow voice greeted them in a brand of English – Hullo darling, how’re you going, all right? – that harked back to an Australia of the 1940s. Sandrina had conscientiously learnt her English in Perth as a young mother so that she could talk with her children in the language they came to prefer at that time. They returned to Italy after ten years in Australia for reasons of family bereavement, loyalty and an unforeseen inheritance so that they never had to consider migrating again. But Sandrina cherished memories of her life in that big sprawling city of Perth, where she had spent a happy young womanhood so long ago. Life there had been freewheeling and easier than Italy, at that time. She now sometimes offered a house she owned in the village to friends, and even to their friends, who came from Australia.

  ‘Didn’t Angelo pick you up?’ she asked, and heard their explanation with a rueful look, taking their bags and listening to the commentary, shaking her head and smiling.

  ‘My husband and I adapted to life here again as quickly as we had taken to Australia,’ she said to the attentive faces of the two younger women. ‘But you know, after all these years I still miss Perth sometimes. I liked eating fish and chips, believe it or not, and my kids were doing well.’ She helped them with their bags. ‘I’ll take you to our house in town if you like, in a few days. You’ll be able to see more things of interest there, historically. It’s my grandmother’s old house really.’

  The sun was beating down and they had lunch in an enormous kitchen beneath an expansive, vaulted timber ceiling and talked at length about the aftermath of the war and how life was then.

  ‘Most of the villagers from here went either to Western Australia or to Argentina,’ Sandrina told them, ‘rather than the United States or Canada.’

  Within a day the heat went out of the air; breezes from the sea and the mountains softly wafted towards them. Celia and Marcia took walks around the old property and looked at white cows, black hens, and breathed in the country smells of late summer. After a few days they were rested and restored. Sandrina’s husband, Mario, a grave and thoughtful man, loaded their bags into his old car and they all drove to the village, with Sandrina still wondering at Celia’s story about Angelo’s non-arrival. Mario had had an appointment elsewhere that day – the reason why he didn’t collect them himself – but he believed something must have happened; Angelo was usually dependable.

  Their house in the village was of an originality and eccentricity not seen in any place they had ever lived but not uncommon here. Made of granite, it was joined to two-storey houses each side, and also to the houses behind it that faced onto another street. Up four steep steps made of stone – more like enormous building blocks – and they were at their front door. The whole effect was of groups of dwellings carved out of dense rock in situ, rather than blocks brought from elsewhere.

  Immediately off the tiny main entrance and to the right, Sandrina opened another little green door that revealed a fairly modern lavatory (cistern at the top and a dangling chain, Celia noted) that had been hewn into the thick stone walls – the smallest w.c. imaginable, up two steps before you squatted on a spacious wooden seat, and with just enough head room. Good, plenty of loo paper. Opposite this green door in the entrance was a washbasin, child-size but adequate.

  Another door (the third within this hall space that only accommodated two people) opened onto the main room, the only room on this level. It was a large, high-ceilinged, whitewashed, tile-floored room with a double bed, a green dresser in the corner, an old-fashioned chest of drawers and a sailor’s trunk near the bed. Between the bed and the green-painted timber window was a black steel (or was it iron?) spiral staircase leading down to the kitchen with bathroom and another toilet.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love with it already,’ said Celia, looking at Sandrina with a comical look of inevitability that made the older woman smile, pleased.

  The third room in the house was on the upper floor – again a large white bedroom, this one containing a fireplace against one wall and a sink opposite, a bed, table and two chairs. The room could only be reached by a further six building blocks outside, so steep that you have to bend your back with the effort of raising knees towards the chin, holding onto the iron rail to hoist yourself up.

  ‘This can be your room, Marcia, if you two don’t want to share,’ said their hostess. ‘It’s the room my grandchildren use for their political meetings. They are in the Green movement; you can see they take their activities seriously.’ So saying she pointed to their manifesto pinned to the wall over the old wooden table, with its stern injunctions which Celia translated as they read:

  Members may use this room as a Centre if they adhere to the following:

  •Each member must contribute to the cleaning of the Centre

  •Members must treat each other with respect and courtesy

  •Rubbish must be placed in respective containers: paper, glass and plastic

  •Members must contribute to the Centre by paying their dues every month

  •Fascists are not welcome in this Centre

  •The bed is not to be used for sex

  Marcia raised her eyebrows at Sandrina and they all smiled ‘This is a serious movement, I can see that,’ she said.

  The house’s simplicity and austerity spoke of another time when its occupants would have led lives of hardship: family gatherings supported by strong religious belief. Sandrina told them that there had been no toilets or bathrooms built into it forty years earlier – the family had to visit the slightly more prosperous house next door for these amenities.

  This little white and green house was home for Celia and Marcia for two months. During the very warm days they kept the main door and windows closed to keep the interior cool. They took long walks, sometimes independently, talked, read and wrote letters, went to the weekly market and met their hosts in the town square where everyone talked, talked and talked. Nowhere had they seen tomatoes so red, drunk a lemon granita so fresh. Sandrina walked around the town greeting everyone with much handshaking and cheek-kissing, though people saw each other almost on a daily basis. There was no one Sandrina didn’t know; many of the villagers were related to her. ‘You have to be careful not to say anything careless; we all know each other’s business because half of us are family,’ she told them, with a short laugh. Weddings, baptisms, funerals and religious feasts rolled along one after the other and those who didn’t attend them sat around talking to someone about the celebrations and the families involved.

  The village shop. which served largely as a meeting-place, sold food and other items such as screws, deodorant and a sink plunger (look them up in the dictionary, Celia!). Antoinette, the owner, was a woman with a face that registered either closed shop or open house, depending on her state of being. A dose of daily gossip seemed to massage her spirit a treat, Marcia said. There were seats outside under the eaves – not particularly comfortable, but elderly people sat there and chatted and observed everyone else. Situated halfway up the hill, and so halfway down to the piazza, the shop met at a junction where the cobbled streets stopped and looked about. From this point, one road wandered towards the countryside and inevitably the mountains which, though distant, snugly surrounded the little town. Another, busier road veered towards winding lanes full of villagers’ houses. Yet another went up towards the school, the six-bed hospital and the houses of those who lived on the top. And the last one led in a determined manner to the old town square, changing its mind and its character on the way with a nod to modernity by way of a smart pink house and pretty garden on the left, and further on to the right acknowledged one of the two cafés – or more of a restaurant. At this uplifted eating place you could dine al fresco in the warm evenings or enter its semi-dark cool interior to eat and at the same time watch some football on television with the waiter.

 
One day, Sandrina asked the two visitors: ‘Are you coming to the wedding?’

  ‘Well, actually we don’t know the bride or groom …’ said Marcia.

  ‘Doesn’t matter! You’ll be welcome – it starts at the church at eleven.’

  On one side of the Piazza del Popolo the pharmacy squatted in a dependable way and Celia went over to buy a box of tissues.

  ‘Tissues? You mean a box of them, where you remove them from the top?’ asked the white-coated woman chemist, or dottoressa, as she was called, looking about in consternation.

  Chatting in dialect seemed the most popular activity in Sanlorenzo – depending on the audience they used either the regional one or the village patois. For the sake of visitors, inhabitants switched to straight Italian. This was the sound, other than church bells, that more than anything broke the habitual silence of the village. The young people next door, siblings, talked continuously to each other, sometimes broke into mournful or strident song and occasionally argued, but mainly they had a lot to say about god-only-knows-what, said Celia. Marcia agreed: ‘They’re more garrulous than Mickey on his fourth whisky.’ Only one person in town had a motor scooter, and there were a few small cars, but other than this there was just one house in town where the silence was broken in the warm, early autumn languor of the afternoons. And how they broke it.

  Marcia woke up suddenly, in her top-storey room, more of a lair really, to a mounting tide of violence across the way. Papa had come home drunk again. Bastardo! Bastardo! cried Maria, the wife, more angry than scared. Odd that it was the husband’s voice that sounded fearful as he roared back at her. Then came the smashing of plates, either flung across the room (at each other or at the walls?) or handfuls of them thrown onto the floor, the way the Greeks do it for celebration or for fun. But this wasn’t fun. So many minutes passed that it seemed to the wide-awake woman that there couldn’t possibly be any crockery left in that godforsaken house. Their racket rubbed at some old wound and she realised her eyes were wet and her heart thumping as if in some frightful anticipation. The man’s voice went quiet and then a lament started up from the teenage daughter, a wail that seemed to come down the centuries, until that too finally took on a diminuendo quality and finally all was desolate. The main force of it was over – midnight come and gone – and Marcia wondered if her worst fates were behind her now. As if to make up for the bedlam, a refined woman and her child who lived up the hill walked past, on their way home, speaking in murmurs to each other, as if saying: This is how we can be.

  The night was still hot and Marcia tossed about on her bed, deciding she’d catch the bus the following day to the beach that looked so inviting from the train. Sandrina had told them she knew an American woman who lived close to the beach whom Celia and Marcia could visit any time as Pauline the American lived her life alla buona – that is, informally.

  But Celia wasn’t interested in the beach, saying she wanted to see a couple of historical sites; she would instead borrow Sandrina’s car and visit a monastery nearby, with her camera. Nothing more had to be said: they knew they were due for some time apart and, no, Celia wasn’t bothered by the row across the way last night. Marcia tried to imagine a slumber that couldn’t be woken by such a din.

  The bus timetable she’d heard about was, she had been told, at the bar which was also near the bus stop. So with a light heart Marcia swung off, bathing gear in a bag, to one of the three bars in town in search of the timetable.

  ‘Ah, no signora,’ said the young girl in careful English, ‘it’s not written down. But I can tell you, let’s see, today is Tuesday, and yes, the bus goes at 9.30. Is that right Giuseppe?’ She called to the kitchen interior. ‘Yes, signora, In forty-five minutes from now.’

  ‘Not at nine? I was told 9 am.’

  ‘No, no, signora, you still have forty-five minutes,’ said the girl. ‘Perhaps you’d like a coffee while you wait?’

  ‘Thank you, I will,’ smiled Marcia. ‘And a further thing, where is the bus stop, please?’

  ‘There,’ said the girl in some surprise, pointing across the road, preparing a coffee.

  ‘Ah. I see no sign, or – nothing written on the road.’

  This made the girl laugh: ‘But signora! – why would there be anything written on the road? We know when the buses go, and from where.’

  ‘Oh I see. Thank you so much,’ said Marcia. ‘Very kind.’ And she sipped her coffee and gazed out at the street. Higgledy-piggledy buildings, many in total decay, others with makeshift repairs that had stayed that way. But more than a few abandoned by families after the war. One pictured them walking away. Unloved lower storeys, now boarded up with bricks. Earthquake damage wrought centuries ago and not helped by old age and bone-crushing poverty. All of this with a dash of modernity here and there: a burst of new hope and fresh building materials made for a collage, this patchwork of dwellings. And in the background the great shoulders of mountains given names by the townspeople, San Giovanni and Cosmolino towards the west, all fitting into each other, and presiding throughout the centuries over human folly below.

  The bus arrived and she made herself understood to the driver that she wished to go to the beach area. At the tiny resort, if it could be called that, Marcia found the American woman Pauline easily, and was taken to the beach where there were a couple of trees near an old hut that was outfitted, despite the simplicity of the place, with a small second-hand refrigerator, a bench and three decrepit chairs. They chatted and ate watermelon and peaches before going for a swim. This was not such a wise idea, Marcia, a non-swimmer, thought – eating then going into the sea – but then, looking at the water, it wasn’t in any way formidable. And she didn’t intend to go out over her depth.

  Pauline, an older woman who had lived in the area for many years, was an artist. She was well known by the local people and once they were settled with their towels, introduced the newcomer to a man called Fulvio. Marcia appraised him from behind her sunglasses – he’d be about, forty? Around her own age. He wasn’t alone, but accompanied by a beautiful large mastiff called Africa whom he clearly adored. It was obvious that Fulvio was very disturbed about an incident which Pauline said had happened the night before. Africa, on heat, had been attracted to a mongrel in the area who lost no time in having his way with her. Fulvio was incensed with the other dog’s owner when he’d found out the previous evening that Africa had escaped from the back yard and was innamorata with the lowly male.

  ‘It’s a disgrace, how dare you,’ he had roared to the mongrel’s owner who scratched his head, wondering at the fuss. ‘My beautiful Africa, ruined.’

  ‘How, ruined?’ said the astonished owner.

  Pauline smilingly told this story to Marcia while Fulvio looked on.

  ‘You see, I found them coupling, and there was nothing I could do,’ he explained in precise English, mixed with Italian, to the sympathetic Marcia. ‘Africa is a finely-bred dog,’

  ‘Of course, one can see that. Let’s hope she isn’t pregnant,’ she murmured.

  ‘Exactly, that’s a fear,’ said Fulvio. It seemed to her that the bitch’s possible pregnancy was not the only issue here. She apprehended, looking at him, that he felt his pet had been sullied beyond salvation since she’d now had sex with a dog of a different and lower breed – no breed at all, really. Come to think of it, some people are like that about human beings, she thought. The two of them stood in the warm oily sea talking and she thought he was a very nice, ingenuous man. He explained that he was a trumpet player and demonstrated the mouth action required to get the necessary vibration going to make sounds. She tried to do it and they spluttered and laughed together in the welcoming water.

  ‘How I love the English language,’ he said in Italian, then in strongly-accented English. ‘I love eet.’ It occurred to her that he had an intensity about him that matched Celia’s.

  Back on the beach Marcia made friends with Africa while Fulvio gazed deep into the dog’s eyes and said. ‘She’s so good – è buona, bu
ona, buona,’ while Marcia laughed outright at his devotion. He laughed too. They talked about jazz and theatre, and he invited her to his house further down the beach while Pauline lazily swam up and down some distance away. Marcia was still intrigued by his reaction to the seduction and she ventured that if Africa had been his young sister who had lost her virginity he couldn’t have been more upset. He agreed that his response was exaggerated:

  ‘Perhaps I have been living too long without human company,’ he smiled.

  Pauline declined the invitation to his place and Marcia, nodding, believed – it was just a feeling – that Fulvio and Pauline had explored anything that might be there between them some time ago and were now occasional beach friends.

  So Fulvio, accompanied on his right by Africa who was panting and grinning like someone who knew the answers, swinging her tail as she swaggered, with Marcia on the other side, all walked along to his white house almost right on the beach. There the man and woman had a very satisfying afternoon – while Africa looked on from the doorway in an interested way for a while. After their exertions Marcia and Fulvio showered and he brewed them coffee before he accompanied her to the bus.

  ‘You were a long time – how was it?’ Celia asked idly, looking up from a magazine.

  ‘Lovely. Met some nice people.’

  ‘Oh? Who?’

  ‘Just that American woman Sandrina told us about. And someone else there who had a dog. Did you have a good look around the monastery?’

  ‘Yes, it’s most beautiful. I took some pictures I’ll show you. I’m glad I went.’ She reached for her nail varnish. ‘Oh, and I needed tissues so I went to the pharmacy.’

  ‘Ah, it was open finally. I peeked inside when I passed and it looked very dependable. Lots of polished wood, the way chemist shops used to look, with shelves of phials and things.’