Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

He smiled. ‘Giuli’s place on Saturday,’ he said, hefting the briefcase. Was he looking forward to it?

‘Their place, now,’ Luisa said.

‘He’s good for her, isn’t he?’ asked Sandro, feeling the need for confirmation. ‘Enzo, I mean?’ That was why they were going for dinner, to keep tabs. Giuli didn’t look vulnerable — in fact, she looked as far from it as was possible, with her fierce little face and her spiky dark hair and her cheerful recklessness on her battered army-grey motorino — but she was. Enzo had been around for more than a year now, but Luisa wasn’t going to let up.

That grudging nod was what he had expected, but Luisa’s expression was more complicated. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

Sandro was at the door before he responded to the note of doubt: wanting it not to be there. Wanting to get off to work leaving everything fine behind him.

‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, with reluctance, standing in the doorway.

‘Well …,’ said Luisa, standing motionless at the kitchen table, the September light falling on half her face. Frowning. ‘I’m not so sure about this political business. She — they — seem very caught up in it. I don’t understand this Frazione Verde. It seems — extreme to me.’

‘Oh, that,’ he said with relief. ‘Extreme? Aren’t they a bunch of hippy, green, Rainbow Coalition types? Very soft-centred, I’m sure. And it’ll just be a phase. Young people, you know.’ He clasped the briefcase to him in an unconscious gesture of protection, but of what or whom, he wasn’t sure.

‘She’s not young, Sandro,’ Luisa said. ‘None of us is young any more.’

The telephone rang.

*

Chiara Cavallaro, curly-headed, small for her age and slender — too slender, her mother had begun to fret, just lately — emerged from the great doorway to the Universita degli Studi into the broad sunshine of the Piazza San Marco, weighed down with books. Worse than school, she’d grumbled to her mother on her return with the reading list, but she hadn’t meant it: the knapsack you carried to school represented something quite different. The pink backpack embellished with friends’ signatures, the childish exercise books, the quaderni with their doodles and their covers decorated with cartoon characters, filled with the diligently neat handwriting of a girl child, easy to please.

What expression would come over her father’s face if she reminded him of that? Her father the stern policeman, soft as a pussycat at home, the man who wanted an easy life, to be indulgent to his daughter and be loved in return.

‘You were never easy to please, angel,’ he’d say, with that wary smile, wanting her still to be his little girl.

‘No,’ her mother would agree, watching her more closely. Round-hipped, good cook, red hair. No fool. Chiara loved her mother.

She loved both of them, of course she did. Blinking into the sunshine, Chiara raised a hand to shield her eyes. It wasn’t just being an only child — most of her friends were only children. It was to do with — with the old order. The old ways of doing things. Cutting corners, sitting it out till retirement in the comfort of the corrupt state sector. She wanted to lean down into her father’s armchair in the evenings, take him by his elbows and shake him. ‘Wake up, Babbo,’ she wanted to say. ‘You’re only fifty-six. Do something to change the world, before it’s too late.’ Start the fight from within.

Political science. That had got him started.

‘At least she’s staying home,’ her mother had said, on Chiara’s side in this one. ‘You know, there are kids who go to the other end of the country, these days, for their laurea .’ Neither of her parents had a degree. Her mother should have had one: she was more intelligent than her husband, which was why she had done so well in the bank.

The truth was, Chiara would have gone to the other end of the country to do her degree, if she’d had a choice. But the course in Florence was an excellent one — among the best. And she’d have had to go to her parents for the money to live away from home. Until now she would, anyway.

‘But political science,’ her dad had groaned, head in hands. ‘Where’s that going to take you?’ It was going to take her away from him, her conservative old dad, and he knew it. She could see it in the face he raised to her, weary, dubious, that he only wanted her to be like him, or her mother, to get a safe job, to have a child, to live in comfort.

‘Comfort’s not what it’s all about, Babbo,’ she’d said.

Was there a word for the expression he’d worn after that? A kind of blankness had fallen over his face, as if he genuinely didn’t understand what she meant. As if he gave up. At the memory, Chiara frowned.

And thank God he hadn’t been there when she got up this morning, because it would have been on the local news, perhaps even in La Nazione , the terrible right-wing rubbish Dad read. It’s got local news, though, he’d plead, as if regional loyalty was enough. As if. She loved her city, of course she did, she was Fiorentina through and through. Which was precisely why — damn, damn, thought Chiara. She felt sick at the memory, last night coming back to her.

Dad would probably say Rosselli was on drugs, or something. His answer to every evil, drugs. Chiara had never touched a drug in her life, but she wasn’t even sure if he knew that. The fact that Giulietta Sarto had been there last night would only have confirmed his conviction that where left-wingers were gathered, there would be ex-convicts, junkies and prostitutes, and Giulietta Sarto qualified on all counts.

‘I know she’s clean now,’ her dad had said a few times. ‘I know Sandro loves her. But once a junkie, always a junkie.’

For a brief second of doubt Chiara did wonder if he might be right, though, as she remembered it … remembered Niccolo Rosselli’s face as blank as her father’s in that moment before he’d toppled headlong like a felled tree, on the stage in front of them all. It had been so — catastrophic.

They’d carted him off in an ambulance, dead or alive, no one knew. Rumours flew before the stretcher even left the hall, then the place had gone crazy in the aftermath, complete chaos, the hardliners setting up a chant, people talking wildly about conspiracy, some drunk singing ‘Bandiera Rossa’. A fight had even broken out on the pavement outside as the ambulance moved away. Inside the meeting room Chiara had been frightened. Properly frightened, wanting her dad kind of frightened, just for a moment there, just when it looked like there might be a stampede.

In the sunshine she was hot, suddenly. Maybe she should just do it. Maybe she did need to get away from her parents, like he said. Her man.

She’d been first out of the introductory lecture and most of the others — she knew some of them from school, again had felt that pang, of wanting to start again in a new city — had hung around, to talk to the speaker, a well-known figure in the city, a left-wing historian and journalist, and something of a hero. He’d spoken openly against the current government, had told the new intake they were the only hope for their country. Chiara had found herself wary of him, of the hero-worship thing at least, and when she saw the crowd gather around the speaker she’d turned and gone, suddenly uncertain, her father’s cynical voice in her head. The man probably said that to every year’s new students: You are your country’s only hope, knowledge is the key. And of all people Sandro Cellini, her father’s best friend and ex-partner in the police force, had come into her head again then: she could almost see his expression, his frown, at the gaggle of eager students, and their hero.