Devotion. Louisa Young

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СКАЧАТЬ at the Agro Pontino, so when Aldo wanted to rent it Don Alessio said yes. It used to be a stable, and still has great stone troughs and iron mangers inside, but from outside it looks more like a tiny castle, with a tower full of pigeons, floors more or less of brick, and the roofs held up with wooden beams. The walls are speckled with lichen, greens and gold, and somewhere on top of the tower, rooks and bright blue sky. It’s a bit of a camp – water from the well, milk from the cows. Farther up the path live a bunch of lovely men in vests – Renzo, Roberto, Armando, Angelo – and their families, in small farmhouses. The men look after the cows and the women make vast vats of tomato sauce in a tiny stone house specially for the purpose. Barns and fields and vineyards recline in the golden sun on all sides; there’s a stream down the side where a Frog Orchestra quack and trill all night long.

      High up in the vaulted kitchen (so-called, there’s no stove and no sink; just a stone basin and a big fireplace) ceiling there’s an iron bar for hanging hams off so the rats can’t get them. The very first night, there was a bat hanging from it! Like a trapeze artist, or an acrobatic mouse. Tom made Nenna really laugh when he tried to explain to her why acro-bat was funny, in this context. She got the joke and he was so proud and happy.

      Sorry! Forgot to finish. It’s two days later. The lake itself is round in its volcanic crater like an egg in a mountain of flour (this is how you make pasta – I’ll explain when we try it at home) surrounded by boggy emerald meadows and Etruscan legends. A soldier made of solid gold lies asleep on the lake’s bed, silent in the deep water with nothing but eels for company. Last night little bats were flying in and out of the children’s bedroom window; livid green crickets cackle all night. I don’t know if it’s the same grasshoppers with scarlet underwings that fly across the meadows all day. Tom is looking it up. Kitty sits for hours damming the stream by moving stones and rocks, daydreaming and talking to herself, tying her wrists with strands of tiny pink and white striped bindweed, and not noticing when dragonflies land on her … Aldo loves this of course, and told her he does exactly the same at work. Sometimes he sits and joins in with her, pointing out the pitch of the land, and how water always takes the shortest course downhill. She got awfully bitten by mosquitoes, and one of the women here said ‘Sei tutta rovinata!’ – ‘You’re all ruined!’ She does look rather dreadful but they all say these aren’t the malaria kind and it’s the wrong time of year – So—

      ‘The dragonfly hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky’ – What song is that from? That lovely one – Vaughan Williams? Tom swims, all day if you let him. The rubber mask and snorkel for staring at fish is very popular. I think he might be beginning to entertain ideas of being a naturalist. There’s a little wooden dinghy; Aldo is teaching them to sail. Tom and Nenna are old enough to go out alone together; Kitty, much to her sorrow, just can’t swim well enough yet. Yes we’re taking our quinine!

      I will post this – I haven’t been to town yet so I haven’t had the chance. Day five or six now.

      Angelo and Renzo have taught them how to milk a cow! On a three-legged stool, with their cheeks resting against the great beast’s smelly side. The milk comes out warm and scary, and it tastes quite different to English milk. The rough-tongued calves with little nubs of horns on their curled brows come up and lick our hands; they sucked appallingly on Kitty’s fingers as if they were udders, and she thought they were going to pull them off. Even so she wants to be a dairymaid, or a cowgirl. There’s a gang of ugly lumpy-faced ducks who line up on a stone water trough by the cowshed which I’m certain must be an Etruscan sarcophagus (Kitty then decided perhaps an archaeologist would be more interesting). They do their homework, play cowboys in the barn, pick peaches as if they were apples, and take jugs up the dusty lane to where huge wooden doors open into the hillside, and Angelo’s wife fills the jugs with wine from a tap on a barrel twice as tall as a cow.

      All my love to you my dearest—

      Nadine

      And so Italy became regular. 1928, 1929, and then the 1930s, so modern and new. Each summer’s visit became a part of a whole, studding the overall experience with its individual jewels. The year Kitty could swim. The year Tom fell out of the tree. Memories grew on memories. And it was all lovely. And each passing year the children were different in themselves as they grew.

      Kitty progressed from cute-like-a-doll to rather stout and serious and, in her eyes, unwanted – unlike Nenna, who, in Kitty’s eyes, was wanted by everybody, especially by Kitty herself. This led to an uneven combination of envy and desire, a watchful attitude, and a sense of dumpy plainness which was not entirely justified, and – had Kitty only known it – more the result of the stultifying school she attended in London, with its obsession with sport and manners over intellect or joy, than of any actual plainness in herself.

      Nenna became aware that she didn’t entirely want to be a girl. Not that she wanted to be a boy, but she wanted to stay free, an unregulated sort of companion-at-arms to boys, one who could take them or leave them. She was not amused by the responsibilities of girlhood: cleanliness, white socks, helping in the house, being told when to be back. Being worried about. There was a march where the boys of the Balilla swung by with novantuno rifles, and the girls with baby dolls. She didn’t mind real babies, and God knows there were enough of them about, but why would one want a toy one? And also she felt rather put on the spot. Understanding instinctively that nobody would want to hear about this, she said nothing. In fact she developed something of a habit of silence, and grew charismatic, attracting attention by not wanting it.

      And Tom? He wanted everything. To swim, to fly, to run away from school, to fight, to swear eternal loyalty, to mind. He wanted to be older. He wanted to get into trouble.

      It was in the summer of 1932 that Nadine found herself confused by something which should have been very simple – writing a letter to Riley. They were staying a little longer than usual that year and perhaps that extra exposure made it all that bit stronger.

      Darling,

      It is lovely to be here again. The beauty! I know it’s so dull to go on about it and I promised myself not to be one of those English people who wafts about Italy saying ‘Isn’t it lovely isn’t it beautiful’ all the time, as if nobody else had ever noticed, and it was in any way an interesting thing to say – but it’s awfully hard. Because it is so beautiful! I allow myself to do it only on the first day, and after that I just say it to myself. Aldo has been teaching us to fish, off the little boat. The lake fish are called coregoni – they don’t even have a name in English. Did I tell you about Ferragosto? The night of celebration of the Virgin Mary’s ascension into heaven? We all walked round the lake in the evening to Trevignano, a loopy road, and when we got near (Aldo had to drag Kitty some of the way I’m afraid) we could see the little fishing boats all lit up with coloured torches, and fireworks were launched from the decks of Il Batello, the lake’s ferryboat: they reflected off the dark water and it made the strangest effect, as if all barriers collapsed between two sides of anything – between water and sky, above and below, then and now … life and death, hope and fear … I wanted so much to have you there to lean back on and share the beauty with. It was almost spiritual for a moment – even though all to the sound of fairground music and the taste of warm nut brittle. Usually, apparently, the ruined castle up the hill behind the town catches fire from the flares marking the path up through the dry dry grass. One year, Aldo was telling us, it didn’t, and everyone was disappointed, so the young men grabbed up the flares and ran about setting the fire on purpose. Then all the older men had to set up a run of buckets to the lake to put it out.

      Where was I? Sorry, Susanna called us for dinner and I have been quite bad about helping out – well, we’re swimming every day, obviously; eating far too much and getting СКАЧАТЬ