‘Is he sick?’
‘No.’ Paola smiles again. ‘Two teeth are coming through. A few more and he’ll be better furnished than Valerio,’ she says. Ettore laughs quietly, and for that moment the simple happiness of the child thriving is enough.
Paola’s face falls first. She looks past Ettore at the implacable white walls of the masseria, and her eyes are troubled.
‘Come in. See our uncle and Marcie. You know how she loves to see Iacopo,’ says Ettore, but Paola shakes her head.
‘She loves it too much. I think she wants to eat him.’
‘Don’t be cruel.’
‘I saw her plenty when we brought you here. Me and Pino. Has Leandro offered you work?’
‘Work as soft as I’d like it,’ he says, disgusted.
‘Take it,’ she says flatly.
‘No, Paola! Must we have the same argument over and over? This is a war, and you of all people know it. Leandro has chosen his side and we-’
‘Poete got caught. They found him with a flask of milk hidden in his coat, and fired him.’
‘Damn him… Clumsy idiot.’ But even though he’s dismayed Ettore is also happy that Paola won’t have to let the man touch her any more.
‘Valerio can’t get work. He stands there coughing and spitting and shaking like a leaf, and no bastard will hire him – why should they? He’s scarce fit to lift his feet, let alone a scythe or flail. We’ve nothing, Ettore. You must take work here.’
‘I can get other work, real work-’
‘Don’t be a fool! You’ve one good leg, and if you open that wound again… I nearly lost you, Ettore. We can’t lose you. Don’t be a fool.’ Her voice is taut with fear. Ettore leans his head against the hot metal of the gate and feels it cutting into him. He says nothing. ‘You must do this, Ettore. Your scruples won’t feed my baby. They won’t. Please.’ He can’t bring himself to speak, because he knows she’s right. Suddenly the gate is like prison bars indeed, and inside he is not his own man. He has no control. She clasps her hard hands around his for a moment before she turns to go, and he takes a breath. She has iron inside her, like the gates. Nothing will bow her.
‘Wait,’ he calls, and she turns. ‘Wait and I’ll get some food for you to take back. If this is our family, let them feed us,’ he says bitterly. Paola doesn’t smile again, but she looks relieved, and she nods.
For four days Ettore does as his uncle suggested, and stews on what his sister told him. She asks of him something she would be unwilling to do herself, but then, her wages, a woman’s wages, would scarcely be worth the self-loathing. He rests his leg. He sleeps and eats and does no work, and feels like he’s marooned outside his own life. He itches to be away, to be whole and gone. He doesn’t eat at the table with his uncle and Marcie and their guests unless he’s directly requested to; he says little, letting their English rattle around him, unexamined. The amount of food they put away, the constant chewing, the way some dishes are sent back all but untouched, enrages him in a way that makes it hard to breathe. The muscles between his ribs pull the bones into a tight cage. Whenever he can he fetches his food from the kitchen instead, and takes it up to the roof to eat it, where the guards have got used to seeing him. On the fourth day his uncle returns to Gioia with the architect, and he’s left alone with the women and the boy, which makes it easier for him to keep himself away. He can see that Marcie’s wounded; he’s being an ungracious guest, he knows, but he doesn’t feel like a guest. He feels like a traitor. He goes around and around the masseria on his crutch, feeling the strength return to his arms and shoulders, the muscles burning, turning hard. The wound in his leg still pulls when he tries to use it – a wrenching feeling deep in the bone – so, since he must heal before he can leave, he doesn’t push it. He’s not dizzy any more, his body feels strong. He wakes earlier each day, with the voices of the dairy herd as it comes in for milking.
On the fifth day Ettore waits until dusk, until he sees lamplight from inside the overseer’s trullo, then he steels himself, limps over to the door and knocks before he can think twice. When Ludo Manzo opens it Ettore can’t prevent the disgust that jars through him. The overseer’s face is deeply scored by years of work outdoors, his top lip is seamed, his teeth are longer and browner than before, but his eyes are as hard and bright as they ever were. He studies Ettore for a second and then laughs out loud.
‘I see from your face that you’ve worked for me before,’ he says. His voice is deep and hoarse, like there’s grit in his throat. For a hideous moment Ettore is too cowed, too tied up with hate and fear to speak. He nods. ‘The boss told me you’d come and ask for work. I guess that’s why you’re here – not from some yearning for my company?’
‘Yes. No,’ says Ettore.
‘Well, I don’t remember you, Ettore Tarano, but I asked in town so I know you’re trouble. I guess since you’re the boss’s nephew, you’re my trouble now.’
‘I only want to work for a wage. Until my leg is whole and I can go back into the fields.’
‘Boy, you’re a damned fool. If I had a rich uncle, I’d make myself his right-hand man and get fat and drunk, and laid.’
‘I want to work for a wage.’
‘I heard you. And I said you’re a damned fool.’ Ludo stares hard at him, with his mouth twisted to one side as he thinks. Ettore fights the urge to fidget, to turn away, or to hit him. To do anything other than stand there in front of him, waiting, at his mercy again. If he did what Ludo suggested, if he used his uncle, he wouldn’t have to do this. He wouldn’t have to suffer the likes of this man. ‘All right. You can’t walk, you can’t carry. You can’t cut wheat. There’s pretty much fuck all you can do, but you can sit on your arse and you can watch, am I right? Take over from Carlo in the trullo by the gates at midnight. Keep watch. The rifle stays there – you take it from him, you hand it to the man who relieves you in the morning. Is that understood?’
‘Yes.’ The effort of staying calm, of staying still, is exhausting. When Ludo nods and shuts the door the breath rushes out of Ettore, and he droops. A guard, with a rifle. Inside pissing out, as his uncle once said to him. And if raiders come from Gioia what then? Will he shoot at them – at people he might know, people he has worked with, people he lives alongside? Ettore limps away.
Until midnight he waits in the vegetable garden, where it’s cool and there’s a good smell of green things. Out of habit he pulls a few weeds and makes a heap of them; he picks a few little tomatoes and eats them. Bats twist and turn silently along the tunnel made by the fruit trees. When it gets too dark Ettore sits down on the broken love seat and looks up at the sky, and thinks about Livia. She managed to walk some of the way home, after she was attacked. She made it to the edge of town, where she was found, and brought the rest of the way. Bruises the size and shape of a man’s fingers on her neck and breasts and thighs; little cuts from the point of a sharp knife, circling her throat like a necklace; bite marks all over her. She was mute with shock; could tell them nothing. It took her two days to die of her wounds, and it was an infection, not the severity of them, that took her. The festering of wounds inside her that her mother couldn’t see or clean. She ran a violent fever; her skin was hot, dry and burnished red. She didn’t smell right, and when her eyes were open they focused on nothing. Tell me I’m your sweetheart, she said, over and over again. Tell me I’m your sweetheart. Ettore squeezed her hand tight in his, and kissed her knuckles, and told her that he loved her and that she was his sweetheart, which made her frown slightly, as if dissatisfied. Towards the end she gave no sign of even hearing him, and only repeated her request over and over again. Tell me I’m your sweetheart. So he told her, over and over again, that she was his sweetheart, even though that was not a term they had ever used before, and it puzzled him; he told her that he loved her, that he belonged to her, and he pressed his hands to her burning skin as if he might wick the heat away from it. And then she died.