When they came down on the first night, and found the crowds sweeping past under the lights, the child had given a whoop of excitement and cried: "Manifestazione!” It was, along “gelato,” his only word of Italian.
Almost every day while they were in Italy, there had been a demonstration of one sort or another: hospital workers one day, then students, bank clerks, bus-drivers, even high-school kids and their teachers. Always with placards, loud-hailers, red flags, and masses of grim-faced police. “Manifestazione,” Jason had learned to shout the moment they rounded a corner and found even a modest gathering; though it wasn't always true. Sometimes it was just a street market, or an assembly of men in business suits arguing about football or deciding the price of unseen commodities — olives or sheep or wheat. The child was much taken by the flags and the chanting in a language that made no sense. It was all playlike and good-humoured.
But once, overtaken by a fast-moving crowd running through from one street to the next, she had felt herself flicked by the edge of a wave that further back, or just ahead, might have the power to break her grip on the child's hand, or to sweep her off her feet or toss them violently in the air. It was only a passing vision, but she had felt things stir in her that she had long forgotten, and was disproportionately scared.
Here, however, the crowd was just a village population taking a stroll along the quay or gathering at caf tables to drink ouzo and nibble side plates of miniature snails; and later, when the breeze came, to watch outdoor movies in the square behind the church.
It was pleasant to sit out by the water, to have the child along, and to watch the crowd stroll back and forth — the same faces night after night. They ate lobster, choosing one of the big, bluish-grey creatures that crawled against the side of a tank, and slices of pink watermelon. If the child fell asleep Alec carried him home on his shoulder, all the way up the steps and along the zig-zag terraces under the moon.
3
One night,the fifth or sixth of their stay, instead of the usual movie there was a puppet-show.
Jason was delighted. They pushed their way in at the side of the crowd and Alec lifted the child on to his shoulders so that he had a good view over the heads of fishermen, sailors from the College, and the usual assembly of village youths and girls, who stood about licking icecreams and spitting the shells of pumpkin-seeds.
The little wooden stage was gaudy; blue and gold. In front of it the youngest children squatted in rows, alternately round-eyed and stilled or squealing with delight or terror as a figure in baggy trousers, with a moustache and dagger, strutted up and down on the narrow sill— blustering, bragging, roaring abuse and lunging ineffectually at invisible tormentors, who came at him from every side. The play was both sinister and comic, the moustachioed figure both hero and buffoon. It was all very lively. Big overhead lights threw shadows on the blank wall of the church: pine branches, all needles, and once, swelling abruptly out of nowhere, a giant, as one of the village showoffs swayed aloft. For a moment the children's eyes were diverted by his antics.
They cheered and laughed and, leaping up, tried to make their own shadows appear.
The marionette was not to be outdone. Improvising now, he included the insolent spectator in his abuse. The children subsided. There was more laughter and some catcalling, and when the foolish youth rose again he was hauled down, but was replaced, almost at once by another, whose voice drowned the puppet's violent squawking— then by a third. There was a regular commotion.
The little stage-man, maddened beyond endurance, raged up and down waving his dagger and the whole stage shook; over on the wings there was the sound of argument, and a sudden scuffling.
They could see very little of this from where they were pressed in hard against the wall, but the crowd between them and the far-off disturbance began to be mobile. It surged. Suddenly things were out of hand. The children in front, who were being crowded forward around the stage, took panic and began to wail for their parents. There were shouts, screams, the sound of hard blows. In less than a minute the whole square was in confusion and the church wall now was alive with big, ugly shadows that merged in waves of darkness, out of which heads emerged, fists poked up, then more heads. Sylvia found herself separated from Alec by a dozen heaving bodies that appeared to be pulled in different directions and by opposing passions. She called out, but it was like shouting against the sea. Alec and Jason were nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile the stage, with its gaudy trappings, had been struck away and the little blustering figure was gone. In its place an old man in a singlet appeared, black-haired and toothless, his scrawny body clenched with fury and his mouth a hole. He was screaming without change of breath in the same doll-like voice as the puppet, a high-pitched squawking that he varied at times with grunts and roars. He was inhabited now not only by the puppet's voice but by its tormentors’ as well, a pack of violent spirits of opposing factions like the crowd, and was the vehicle first of one, then of another. His thin shoulders wrenched and jerked as if he too was being worked by strings. Sylvia had one clear sight of him before she was picked up and carried, on a great new surging of the crowd, towards the back wall of one of the quayside restaurants, then down what must have been a corridor and on to the quay. In the very last moment before she was free, she saw before her a man covered with blood. Then dizzy from lack of breath, and from the speed with which all this had occurred, she found herself at the water's edge. There was air. There was the safe little bay. And there too were Alec and the boy.
They were badly shaken, but not after all harmed, and in just a few minutes the crowd had dispersed and the quayside was restored to its usual order. A few young men stood about in small groups, arguing or shaking their heads or gesticulating towards the square, but the affair was clearly over. Waiters appeared. They smiled, offering empty tables. People settled and gave orders. They too decided that it might be best, for the child's sake, if they simply behaved as usual. They ordered and ate.
They saw the young sailor who watched for sharks. He and a friend from the village were with a group of girls, and Jason was delighted when the boy recognised them and gave a smart, mock-formal salute. All the girls laughed.
It was then that Sylvia remembered the man she had seen with blood on him. It was the older waiter from the hotel.
“I don't think so,” Alec said “You just thought it was because he's someone you know.” He seemed anxious, in his cool, down-to-earth way, not to involve them, even tangentially, in what was a local affair. He frowned and shook his head: not in front of the boy.
“No, I'm sure of it,” she insisted. “Absolutely sure.”
But next morning, at breakfast, there he was quite unharmed, waving them towards their usual table.
“I must have imagined it after all,” Sylvia admitted to herself. And in the clear light of day, with the breakfast tables gleaming white and the eternal sea in the window frames, the events of the previous night did seem unreal.