Deaf to the labourers’ hoots and jeers Lila tottered through the mud and slippy rotten sops of cut greens, her underarms, buttocks, stomach, legs, caked with dirt. She fled diagonally across the field, and ran with quick picky steps, but when she heard Arianna’s shouts she simply stopped, sat in the mud, hung her head and covered her ears, waiting for whatever would catch up with her. Startled, the men also stopped. Keeping their distance they waited for the police.
* * *
In the ambulance the women faced each other, eyes wide at the strangeness of being brought from an open ploughed field into a box where they could hear themselves breathe. Wrapped in a rough red blanket Arianna shivered violently and would not look up, her ankles and forearms crossed with deep bramble scratches, her neck scored purple, swollen to show the clear imprint of a belt. Lila refused to be touched and sat forward, head down, hands tucked under her thighs. This was her fault. Clearly all her fault. As she slowly warmed, the punctures on her back began to suppurate. She fought against sleep, fearing the sensation that she was evaporating, becoming lighter than air; but sleep, or something like it, brought on by a mess of drugs came in soft buckling waves, impossible to resist. The accompanying officer, dressed in a smart and faultless uniform, looked out of the back of the vehicle and watched the road and fields recede. In full daylight the mountains took on the soft contours of a strong man’s arm.
* * *
They were separated at the hospital and taken to small bright booths set side by side. Alone, Lila slipped off the high examination table and hid under it with the thin tunic drawn over her head. She squeezed hard against the wall. The pressure and the cool tiles soothed the sores on her back and the penetrating ache in her shoulders. Crouched under the bed she could smell cigar smoke in her sweat, and the sweet, cold stink made her retch. She did not want to sleep and she did not want to be awake, neither did she want to be alone. She called for Arianna. Her voice sounded separate, not of her making, so that the sound itself became something to fasten on to.
Almost two hours after they had arrived at the hospital a second woman officer returned with a photographer, a doctor, and two uniformed police. The woman spoke to Lila in a whispered singsong, supposing that Lila was as degraded as she appeared.
‘Can you come out? Can you stand? Can you sit?’
Lila allowed the woman to coax her out. She sat where she was told and did not flinch as the doctor opened the back of her tunic and unpicked the temporary dressing.
The man spoke in a flat and practised tone, almost a private whisper as he described his actions. ‘I’m going to lift and extend your arm. Let me know if this is too painful.’
Lila allowed the man to hold out her arm and softly turn her head, and made no complaint when he compressed the skin either side of the wounds. The dry sound of dressings being unsnapped from their packets identical to the sound of that first punch — a sharp crack.
‘These are cigar burns.’ The doctor began to count the blisters across her neck, shoulders, back, behind her knees, and on the soft underside of her arms. ‘And these,’ he said, ‘are bites. Here, and here. Here. These marks are older.’
She said nothing.
The brothers, trading places, warned that if either of them spoke they would return to finish what they’d started. Lila didn’t doubt their threats, she wasn’t lucky, a simple fact, and she knew when to take advice.
The photographer took pictures of her back and shoulders. He took photographs of the nape of her neck, showing where her hair had been tugged out. Coming round to face her he photographed the bruises and lacerations to her thighs, wrists, and breasts, then took a single photograph of her face. The men who touched her now wore gloves. Lila waited for them to be done.
After searching for traces of fluids, the doctor began to inspect for matter, dirt captured on the rough skin on her feet and in the grazes on her knees, traces of ash and tobacco swabbed from the wounds. He measured the bruise about her neck, then one by one the bites, burns, the lacerations were swabbed, cleaned and finally dressed. The sounds of utensils set in their trays, of metal against metal, and metal against glass, sang unnaturally sharp in the small booth, sharp sounds tightened by the hard walls, unabsorbed and brittle, unexpectedly invasive.
With the examination complete Lila was left alone with the promise that someone would return with clothes. She waited, stared at the door until her eyes watered and wished herself, uselessly, elsewhere. The woman returned, apologizing, with two T-shirts held to her chest. A charitable order provided the clothes and this was all they had at the moment. The clothes were new, both with designs, smiling cartoon characters Lila did not recognize. She sounded apologetic. It was OK; no one else had worn them.
When the police returned she’d changed her mind, come around to the idea that it didn’t much matter if she did or did not speak, and that the effort not to speak would require resources that she knew she didn’t have. The choice was a simple economy.
They met the men at the station, she said. If they wanted to know exact details they could speak with Rafí at the Hotel Stromboli. They’d raided the hotel a number of times and they would know him.
The brothers were tall, slender, active, with sporting bodies, trimmer and fitter than the men she was used to. Their hair was cropped military-style. They had clipped their body hair, and one of them, the younger brother, had waxed his arms. Except for a thumbprint mole under the older brother’s right nipple there were no tattoos, no distinguishing marks. She couldn’t guess their ages, but they appeared younger than the officers now questioning her. They almost certainly weren’t Italian, and weren’t familiar with the city nor the autostrada: when they were driving they took a number of wrong turns. She couldn’t swear to it but there were times when they spoke to each other in pidgin French, or slang, or in a private invented language.
After the first punch, when the passenger, the younger man, hit Arianna, the brothers had joked with each other. The older man was persuasive, and he kept talking about a party in Livorno, and that other women were being brought there. Rafí had promised this earlier, maybe the day before, and Lila in particular liked the promise that they would be introduced to influential men; judges, lawyers, businessmen, but knew that this was unlikely. In their long slow afternoons Lila and Arianna had concocted a loose plan where they would move to America, to Los Angeles, or stay in Europe and work together in Milan, Paris, or maybe even return to Barcelona. They wanted to be kept by one man, why not, or better still, to be able to afford an apartment of their own where they would establish themselves with a select and limited number of clients, men that they would choose, and their working lives would run to a timetable of regulated and well-paid fucks. This hope had underscored every discussion, and the brothers’ hint that they understood this was one of the night’s enduring cruelties.
The second officer asked for other details, he could tell from her accent that she wasn’t Italian. Lila nodded, yes, she’d come to Naples and worked for a while in a shop on via Duomo. Her family needed money. She often used this story, and Rafí laughed at it, because, let’s face it, she’d never worked upright in her entire life, and, best of all, even if in some crazy alternate universe she did find herself a job men would always smell her out, because first and foremost she was a whore: where would she be without those American servicemen she was so fond of, and those good clean Scandinavian boys from NATO who were always so generous with their drugs? Lila also cringed at the idea, but it made a better story than the way she passed her days. For Lila time divided between doing something and doing nothing, and she dreaded time spent on her own. Alone at the Stromboli she felt like baggage, like substance without worth.