The Story of Lucy Gault

7

The brass band played in the wide piazza of the Citta Alta, the outside tables of the piazza’s single ristorante shaded by a green and white awning. Il Duce had come, Il Duce was on the way: there was confusion before the cheering began below, in via Garibaldi and piazza della Repubblica: Il Duce had arrived.

‘Tosca,’ the Captain said, but then the music from the opera stopped. The conductor waved a hand over the whole piazza, commanding silence, although mostly the piazza was empty. Il Duce’s song began.

‘Ecco!’ a slow old waiter murmured, as if from sleep. ‘Bene, bene …’ he whispered, pouring the last of the Barolo. And in the new town below, the same tune played, amplified from a record, so that everyone, everywhere, knew that II Duce was here at last.

Heloise hadn’t spoken since they had been led to their table beneath the awning, nor while the dishes of the lunch they had ordered were brought to them, nor while she had played with hers, leaving most of the food untouched. It was a bad day, the Captain said to himself. In her eyes there was the nagging of what lay at the depths of her melancholy, as always there was on a bad day. She tried to return his smile but could not and, too well, he knew she saw their child allowing the waves to have their way, without resistance because that was their child’s choice. His intuition was sharp on bad days; he always knew. His denial of her dread was in the pressure of his fingers, but there was no acknowledgement, no flutter of life in the hand he had reached out for and still held, no sign that this time he had succeeded in dispelling the worst that might have been.

A yellow dog crossed the piazza, the only creature there but for the bandsmen and the waiter and the occupants of a single pavement table. The waiter had loosened the stud beneath his black bow tie. Skinny and seeming ravenous, the dog scattered the contents of a waste-bin. No more than weekend musicians lazily playing their opera arias, the white-uniformed bandsmen had acquired a strut of arrogance in how they played now, as if already they marched through conquered lands.

‘Va’via! Va’ via!’ the old waiter shouted at the dog. ‘Caffè, signore?’

‘Si. Per favore.’

He loved her, more than he could ever have loved anyone, but today, as so often before, she made on her own the effort he could not help her with. How long would it be before Italy was no longer a country to find refuge in? Calmly she asked that.

He shook his head. Somewhere there was cheering and when it ceased a voice echoed through the loudspeakers, noisily excited, its message often punctuated by what might have been the smack of a fist on a palm. Morte! Sangue! Vittoria! Vittorioso! The same exhortations were repeated, like punctuation also. Across the piazza the yellow dog was scratching out its fleas.

‘Yes, Italy soon may not want us, either,’ he said, and thought again how much he loved her. They lay in one another’s arms, they talked, she read out to him something she liked in a book, they were companions on their journeys; and yet on days like this one, she belonged only to herself.

‘Please don’t ask me to go back,’ she whispered, her tone so soft, so much without expression, that the words were hardly there.