Then, once it had become very cold, Donna Costanza led her away to her house. But she didn’t hold Lina’s arm, as she otherwise would have done; instead, she walked at a distance off to her right as though in some way Lina had failed her.
The birds were already plucked and singed. It was difficult to say what kind they were. Grackles, she supposed. Donna Costanza roasted them over the fire while Lina chased a housefly around the dining room with a clump of scarf in her fist.
The baker Rocco was in the alley. She saw him in the window. He was holding in place a clapboard that had fallen off the rear of his building, and one of his young sons held a nail while another hammered it with brisk, confident strokes. Snow fell on them.
On the floor of the fireplace, the blackened fat of the birds smoked.
The two women also ate chicory from the yard.
Mrs. Marini was careful to cut away the meat from the legs and breasts of the birds on her plate. However, the distress of spite and the reversal of her hopes had made her ravenous, and she finally ate the ribs, too, cracking them between her jaws and swallowing them, hoping to quell her rioting stomach. They were Umberto’s bones, she imagined.
“Father will buy that farm now,” Lina said.
Mrs. Marini made a Victrola-cranking motion in the air, meaning it had been many times that she had heard this distasteful song before.
“He can use the dowry money to buy the oxes he needs,” Lina said.
“Oxen.”
“Oxen. He’ll make it up to me. You misunderstand him. He’s faithful to us.” Lina was terribly overexcited. Her arms had gone white, and the green veins were visible through the skin. Her look was dreamy, but the dream was perhaps the kind in which one does disgusting things and then tries to hide them from the police.
“I find this whole arrangement medieval, frankly,” Mrs. Marini said.
Lina looked at her.
“I had hoped you would marry above your station, which the promise of this country makes a reasonable goal,” she said. “It’s as though I had some priceless stamp and he mailed it.”
The fly landed on the table, and Lina at last killed it with her hand.
Mrs. Marini said, “He’s sold you cheap, aren’t you proud of him?”
“No, please.”
“What’s its name, your peasant master?”
“Mazzone, Vincenzo. Please don’t.”
“Your children will misspell your name on your grave now.” Mrs. Marini had organized all of the heads of the birds on the lip of her plate so that their beaks hung over the edge, as though straining to peck at the crumbs of bread on the tablecloth.
Her stomach appealed for more.
She knew that soon she would say something indiscreet, unnecessary, and hateful and that later she would feel a modicum of remorse, which she would truss and dispose of like this: Fatti maschii, parole femine (“manly deeds, womanly words,” the motto of the state of Maryland).
“I expected you would be loud and make a scene but later on you’d be kinder to me,” said Lina.
“In fact, I am too disgruntled to raise my voice,” Mrs. Marini said. Cattishly she smoothed her thinning hair. “Did you know that two years ago he had it in mind to buy a different farm? But your mother said he must wait until you and your sister were married so that you wouldn’t have to be spinsters on a croft once they died. And did you know that he said he intended to go, with you three or without you? That those were his very words? And that your mother and I had to hide the money in another bank to foil him? There’s your ‘faithful’ for you.”
The uneaten bird on Lina’s plate bathed in its cold juice, on which a skin had formed. “Yes, I did know that,” Lina said impatiently.
“And, and, he’d already bought the bell for the cow!”
“No, it was a gift.” Lina pulled on a hank of her shapeless hair.
Mrs. Marini was extremely annoyed.
“I know all about that,” Lina said. “But it’s finished now. And he’ll be happy. But I hoped you would say something else. I hoped you. .” She flushed and her little ears flared.
Two or three more nasty, discrediting revelations percolated against the lid of Mrs. Marini’s brain. “Oh, what do you want out of me?” she asked.
The girl’s face was open, charming, perfect, utterly stupid, and loving.
“Please don’t be disgusted by me,” Lina said.
“Why in heavens not?”
Lina rubbed a piece of the fly off her hand with her napkin. She said, in a burst, “Won’t you come with me, at least?”
“When?”
“Saturday. When I meet him.”
Umberto would be outraged.
“Certainly!” she exclaimed.
As regards making Lina her apprentice, only an hour before Mrs. Marini had believed in the idea passionately, but having thrown herself into action after many months of brooding, only to see competing events turn her intentions awry at the last moment, her resolve, being passionate, cooled and, once Lina had been married for several years, no longer seemed so pressing. For the time being, it even seemed in poor taste, because Lina and Vincenzo were unable to conceive a child.
“Sophist,” Nico said in an undertone, but again it was not really him.
Mrs. Marini had lowered herself by a long rope to the floor of the crevasse in her mind. Fungi sprouted from the viscous cavern walls. A yeasty ooze enveloped the feet of her dead, who paced away down here, along with a few unappeasable, carping previous selves. One of them wore a Nico mask, but Nico never came.
“You’re the child,” said the one in the Nico mask. “You’re a child, and you’ve always been a child. You wanted to be the one who prepared the marriage, but you were upstaged. Then you threw a tantrum.”
“Impostor,” she replied. “Don’t think I’m fooled. He was not so smug.”
It was really her self of about 1920 who was talking to her, from the period after he had died but before the swerve. It ably wore the dangling jowls of the Nico mask and hoisted up the shaggy brows in mock surprise to emphasize a word as he would do; however, her hair of that time (thick still, but colorless) overflowed the edges of the mask like a frizzled mane.
“She was a glabrous, faithful, sexless thing, which offended you. So as punishment you made her walk where the goons could look up her slip, and then you tried to rake muck about the father. When that didn’t satisfy you, you took away the job she didn’t know she was about to get.”
“You always had to be the one and only,” her sister sneered, in a linen smock and her leggings, kicking the ooze.
“Why not simply say you changed your mind? I know why. Because you lacked rationale,” said the voice in the mask. It was such a compelling impersonation that she wished she were taken in by it. “You insist on rationale. Then your disappointment over the shabby groom presented itself as a distraction you might twist into an excuse.”
“You are a petty cuss,” her mother said in the dialect of the town of her youth, which Mrs. Marini had had no occasion to speak in fifty years.
Here is how she met her husband.
In her town, in Lazio in 1876, a platoon of soldiers under the new king was squatting in the palace of the duke, who had lately been expelled. The local boys challenged them to a footracing tournament. She was sixteen. Her mother forbade her to go and watch, but she defied her.
The boys and the soldiers ran one-on-one sprints from the palace steps across the weed-ridden square. They were stripped to their undershirts, barefoot for fairness because the soldiers had only their boots and the boys wore light sandals. At the end they ducked their heads in the spray of the fountain. There was a crowd. She would be seen. That someone in the crowd should betray her to her mother may have been her preeminent aim, but no one seemed to notice her.