Another old man shouts out to his two sons standing near by (one of them is in officer’s uniform): The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! The sons shrug their shoulders.
A few seconds later thunder rattles the tall windows and the force of the rain is such that it sounds like fire. The guests look towards the streaming dark windows. The lights on the colonnade of the Scala have gone out. Laura whispers to Umberto that she wishes to lie down in her room.
The boy stares at the dark life-size portraits on the opposite walclass="underline" they represent Piedmontese notables of the Risorgimento. Alone with his son for the first time in his life, Umberto wants to make a ritual gesture. He approaches his son from behind and lays his hands upon his head in the manner of a bishop. The boy remains motionless. He is more aware than he has ever been of the question he cannot formulate when he looks down at the farmhouse before daybreak.
It is now as if the rain is beating upon the glass case in which the city is being exhibited. From a stair-well at the back of the hotel there ascends a woman’s long-sustained scream.
A waiter hurries to the heavy wooden door with brass fittings which opens on the corridor leading to the back of the hotel. But the scream (the scream of a new kitchen-maid from the country who fears lightning and thunder because they are a sign of the wrath of God) has already had its effect. It has already reminded many of the guests that they have been awaiting such a scream in such circumstances—with dread or with inexplicable expectation—for years. For them the scream is a signal.
The immediate effect of the storm is to disperse the open-air meetings of workers and demonstrators. It achieves what Turati, the socialist leader, failed to achieve in his appeals for order and calm.
But there are other effects. It is not only the country kitchen-maid whom the storm has frightened. Those responsible for law and order in Milan have been reminded of the ineluctable nature of storms when once they begin. In the flashes of lightning which, although they emanate from the sky, appear to light up the piazza from below, in the rolls of thunder echoing between the far mountains and the near buildings, in the incontestable force of the downpour and in the hysteria of the electrical tension, they have seen the spectre of their working population in revolt. Two workers and one policeman have been killed during the day. After the storm the spectre looms larger than the facts. The forces of order must immediately take the most extreme measures against the least provocation: only thus can the revolutionary storm, of which the natural one that has just passed was only a harmless symbol, be averted. The massacre of the following days is assured.
Dinner in the hotel dining-room is well attended. The guests wear evening dress. Thus the male diners and the waiters, both wearing black and white, are distinguished by their positions and actions rather than by their appearance, and one has the impression that all the men in the large room are attendant upon the women in their multi-coloured dresses. A fountain plays, and around it are arranged lemon trees and oleanders in wooden tubs. On the tables are roses.
Umberto takes a white rose from the chalice on his table, carefully trims its stem, wipes it with his folded handkerchief, stands up and, holding the barely open white rose in front of his vast, untidy face, the colour of yellow clay, bows to Laura, pouting his mouth in the vulgar Italian manner which, describing a kiss, denotes appreciation. Yet Umberto modifies the vulgarity of the gesture: the symbolic kiss is restrained and he holds the rose in front of his mouth—as though the flower were the word which his lips were forming.
Please, dear Laura, accept—
Put it down, she says, furiously embarrassed by his theatricality and by the implication of present courtship: an implication which, in her mind, unpardonably confuses the past with the present.
Umberto gently hands the rose to his son who is seated between the two of them.
You give it to her, he says.
The boy places the rose by his mother’s soup spoon.
Suddenly she is reassured. She considers it possible that Umberto has understood what she wishes to establish: namely that all his dealings with her must be made by way of her son. Picking up the rose she slowly twirls it between her fingers, raises it to her eyes, and lays it down again on the table in front of the boy.
Umberto, noticing the sudden change in her attitude and incapable of not exploiting an unexpected success, says: Shall we eat Pollo alla Cacciatore? If I am not wrong, dear Laura, you always liked Pollo alla Cacciatore.
This is the first time that he has mentioned the past. The boy is immediately alerted. Laura is momentarily touched by his remembering. The remark confirms what she wishes to be confirmed: the fact that, a long time ago, Umberto was in a position to be the father of her child. Unaware of the eloquence of her expression, she half smiles at Umberto. The boy, intercepting the glance, recognizes it. He has seen Beatrice look at Jocelyn with a similar expression. It is a look which confesses a secret common interest deriving from some past experience from which, by its nature rather than by its timing, he is conscious of being inevitably excluded. It is a look which makes him conscious of being the third person.
What does Pollo something mean? he asks.
It is a chicken cooked in wine with mushrooms and peas and young vegetables. Pollo alla Cacciatore.
But is that what it means?
It means chicken cooked like hunters cook it.
The look and the dish henceforward became associated in his mind. It is the look of the Pollo alla Cacciatore.
The Mediterranean breaks along the long coasts of Italy. In places the waves are phosphorescent in the dark. Between the coasts millions are hungry. In the south they riot without hope.
An assault on the town hall, devastation and destruction of the tax registers; then the arrival of police or soldiers, volleys of stones from the crowd, opening of fire by the troops. The crowd retreats, cursing, leaving its dead and wounded on the ground. In a few months in another commune the story repeats itself.
The tax on flour is over 50 per cent: on sugar 300 per cent, on meat and milk 20 per cent. Salt is so highly taxed that many peasants never taste it. Meanwhile it is an offence against the excise for those who live by the coast to draw salt water from the sea. Guards have shot at women coming down to the beaches with buckets. It is safest at night. Phosphorescent drops form for a moment along the rim of the bucket, in whose illegal water she will cook tomorrow’s pasta.
I FATTI DI MAGGIO 1898
The boy wakes early, as he intended to do. He slips out of the hotel before either of his parents are astir.
Because the people in the streets are speaking a language which he cannot understand, the significance of most of what he sees is ambiguous. The commonplace and the exceptional are mysteriously confused. Is the gentleman who flings himself into a carriage and shouts at the driver frightened or late? The six girls advancing with linked arms (and their hair tied up in scarves)—do they sweep the other pedestrians off the pavement every morning as they are doing today? A man by the kerb is reading out loud from a newspaper. Is it a tram stop? The men who gather round him begin to shout. Are they shouting in approval or anger? A jeweller has closed his shop and pinned a piece of paper with writing on it to the shutters.