Image: Dawn over the Adriatic
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Plot reminder: After her initial investigations in Lincolnshire, Mary has now decided to fly out to Italy. In an earlier chapter the local journalist George Shreeves informed her that the carabinieri had traced Vincenzo D'Ambra's younger brother.
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I know people who as a habit read two books simultaneously, and who would find the idea of one at a time quaintly bizarre. My adoptive mother's bedside cabinet habitually featured two or even three bookmarked volumes, for example; upon finishing a chapter of one, she would blithely resume where she'd left off in another. Once many decades ago I tried it myself, the end of the summer between lower and upper sixth. There was the copy of Pride and Prejudice my English Literature teacher had assigned as our holiday read and a recently acquired copy of Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha Christie being a writer for whom at the time I had developed a deep and all-consuming passion, I couldn't wait to get started on the latter, but was worried that by doing so I wouldn't have time to finish the former before the beginning of term. Following my adoptive mother's example, I therefore set about reading alternate chapters. The experiment was a disaster, my mind not nearly dextrous enough to cope. I would imagine Poirot contemplating the lifeless body of Elizabeth Bennet, Countess Andeyni engaged in shameless flirtation with Mr D'Arcy. Such was my befuddlement I couldn't say I really enjoyed either novel, and swore never to repeat the folly.
But that was how I had felt on the day of Irene's funeral. Like I was trying to make sense of two different narratives at the same time, a pair of whodunnits which whilst inter-related were separated by an enormous temporal gulf. Sixty-four years, the best part of anyone's lifetime. By persuing both investigations simultaneously, I feared I would only confuse my ideas, further muddy the waters. I needed to get my chronology right. Start at the very beginning.
The small Italian fishing port of Punto San Giacomo. This was where my father's story had begun.
And so it was that little more than twenty-four hours after Irene had been lowered into her final resting place - a period in which I had driven more than three hundred miles from Ravensby to Sussex then the following morning back north as far as Stansted - I found myself touching down at Brindisi airport.
Though the English day the Boeing had lifted me from had been a bright and pleasant one, the temperature increase upon stepping out of the cabin door was significant enough to have me gasp for breath. Thirty-two degrees, the captain had announced before commencing landing procedure. Lifting my gaze to the azure expanse above me, I was unable to detect even the merest wisp of a cloud. I closed my eyes for a moment, felt the warm kiss of the sun on my face. Welcome Mary, it seemed to communicate. And good luck.
The hire car was a Fiat, some model of family saloon. Its handling was different from my smaller, lighter Renault back home, and this plus the fact of having to mentally reorientate things from left to right provoked several irritated beeps from local motorists as I attempted to navigate my way from airport to the southbound carriage of the main coast road. At one point a van driver chose to express his scorn for my driving skills verbally, the words he thundered through the opened window as he overtook me accompanied by wildly gesturing arm. Che cazzo! It was an expression I doubted would be listed in the Italian phrasebook I'd picked up at Stansted.
The expression which would be most useful to me had already been committed to memory, needless to say.
Sto cercando...
I'm looking for...
As George Shreeves of the Ravensby Evening Rcho had unwittingly informed me the day before, I had an uncle.
Uncle Salvatore.
*
It was early evening when I arrived at my destination, this following a sixty mile stretch of the coast road, the sparkling blue waters of the Adriatic revealed in periodic teasing glimpses to my left beyond the vines and olive groves, the white cluttered buildings of passing port towns.
I'd visited Italy twice before. Once, the sweltering, shoulder-barging chaos that is Venice in August; the second time, an altogether more relaxing sojourn amidst the smoky green hills of Tuscany during whit week half-term. Whilst by their nature very differing trips, there was something familiar and thus mildly disappointing to both experiences - almost as if those views I dutifully photographed had already been glimpsed, the sensations they evoked already lived. Italy is like Coca-Cola. Like MacDonald's. An ubiquitous logo you just can't avoid. It's there on the inside pages of the newspaper you're leafing though. There flickering pleasantly away in the background of the Sunday afternoon matinee you're half watching. There in the roots of every other polysyllabic word you utter. A sprawling theme park of marbled Roman columns and vine-bearded hills, of towering rennaissance-era cathedrals and gloriously precarious hilltop citadels.
Rolling along amidst the impatient, horn-beeping traffic of Punto San Giacomo that June evening, it felt as if I'd been ushered behind the scenes however. Had somehow breached a secret portal, been deposited into that other Italy - the one they don't tell you about in the travel shows on TV, the one the Hollywood film directors have never ventured to. Real Italy, in short.
The town revealed itself as long, sea-hugging grid of narrow streets, the buildings mostly three- or four- storey, their stuccoed facades cracked and crumbled by decades of what I could only imagine were lethally hot summers alternated by wind-ravaged winters. Washing loads hung from upper floor balconies, underwear and all; with the car windows wound all the way down, I could hear the housewives call out across and down and up to each other as they busily pegged and unpegged. Ground floor doors meanwhile opened straight onto the street, breeze-flapped net curtains revealing humble interiors. Here, each slammed door echoed the length of the street, each cry of a baby, each crossed word. In Punto San Giacomo, privacy came at a premium it seemed.
I ducked into the first hotel I came across, where a pleasantly smiling woman ten years or so my junior eventually responded to the repeated and increasingly impatient ping of the reception bell. The difficulty I had in communicating to her that I would be requiring a single room for at least two nights and possibly longer seemed somewhat inauspicious. Here in Real Italy, I quickly realised, a foreign visitor would not find it easy to make themselves understood. Our dialogue amounted to a succession of embarrassed smiles, futile hand gestures, my repetition of half-remembered words from French O'Level in the hope they might be similar in Italian. Sal du bain. I would like a sal du bain per favore.
That my room indeed resulted as en suite was perhaps more a result of luck than linguistic clarity. Whilst the attempt at honouring the town's maritime heritage via a blue-and-white colour scheme and the fishing net dangling from the ceiling was commendable, I would have happily sacrificed decorative character for a shower head that offered more than a weak, measly dribble of water.
It was as I was towelling myself off post-shower that I realised I'd forgotten to pack the European adaptor I'd bought for the previous summer's trip to Provence. My Nokia was completely useless then. Even more regrettable was my oversight at bringing a packet of my lactose intollerance pills with me. Without them - as had happened when I was twelve after pigging out on my adoptive mother's homemade strawberry milkshake - it was likely that the consumption of any dairy product would have me dashing towards the nearest toilet bowl, and that close by I would have to remain for a quite a substantial length of time. So, no cappuccino or gorgonzola or ice cream or tiramisu. At least half of what was good about Italy denied to me.
It was a disappointment I digested quickly however. I wasn't on any kind of damn holiday, after all.
*
It was approaching eight that I ventured outside. The first peachy glow of sunset illuminated the inland portion of sky; pleasantly, refreshingly, the heat was draining from the day.
The harbour proved a small but heavily populated affair; between sail boats, yachts and fishing trawlers there must have been fifty or more vessels swaying in the breeze-rippled waters. In and around the latter category men busied themselves with nets and other final preparations ahead their excursion into the moonlit waves of the Adriatic.
Stretching beyond the harbour wall towards a rocky, protruding headland was a narrowing stripe of beach. Recent decades had clearly seen a municipal-level attempt at establishing the town as a resort, the beach accessed by a neat, palm-lined pedestrian promenade, this in turn lined on its inland side by a succession of bars, restaurants and souvenir shops. It was whilst taking a few idle steps along the street that I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was hungry, and not just in that slightly nagging way of an approaching mealtime but that crushing, almost debilitating level of hunger which follows a sustained twenty-four period of limited calorie intake.
I thus found myself slipping into a seat at an outside table of the next pizzeria I came across. As other restaurants I'd passed, the place was still setting up for the evening - a scant smattering of customers, a waitress in smart blouse busily arranging cutlery and glasses. Similarly to my travails with the woman at the hotel, once having caught the young lady's attention I experienced no little difficulty in communicating my requests. At first I wondered if her confusion may have been cultural rather than linguistic in nature, the idea of a pizza without mozzarella as much an anathema to an Italian as battered cod without chips to an English person. But no, she simply hadn't understood it seemed, had to call across to a gentleman of retirement age sipping a glass of wine alone at a neighbouring table behind, dog curled up asleep at his feet - a local thankfully blessed by a modicum of English. I had a lactose intolerance problem, I explained to him, twisting my neck backwards. Had left my pills at home, couldn't risk eating much cheese. The man nodded, smiled kindly. "A little. I tell them to put just a little."
And yes, whilst the resulting pizza was indeed topped by a smaller quantity of mozzarella than others I saw the waitress bring out, I still found myself discreetly peeling the white blobs away with my knife, just to be on the safe side. A few minutes later as I settled my bill and rose to leave, I deemed it correct of me to offer the gentleman a final word of gratitude for his linguistic intervention.
Lifting his eyes from the onrushing coils of waves in front of him, his face was once more illuminated by a kindly smile. "Oh, was nothing madam. Any time." Hand lifting wine glass to lips, his gaze then resumed its steady scrutiny of the billowing sea. It was almost as if he were watching out for something, awaiting some tumultous arrival. The flagship of an unknown, conquering race. The distant swell of an incoming tsunami.
Before turning back inland towards the hotel, I paused for some moments above the harbour, watched the gentle procession of the trawlers as they made their way to the open sea. A scattering of gently bobbing lights amidst the darkening waves, like still-twinkling stars fallen from the firmament above.
Had he survived the war - had he not been so brutally knifed down before his 22nd birthday - was this the life which would have awaited my father, I wondered? That hard, noble slog of the fisherman? The face of the old man he would have become etched and carved by long decades of staring down the elements, of stoically shrugging off all that those endless star-guided nights would have thrown at it. The gales gusted into it, the waves unleashed down upon.
A most wearying and humble of lives, yes, but one he at least would have lived.
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