Louisa Young - Devotion

‘You know we came here for our honeymoon?’ she said. ‘I keep catching glimpses of my younger self, loitering in that doorway, say’ – she pointed at the vast, shadowy entrance to an invisible courtyard beyond. ‘Or eyeing up a statue, or considering the light on the river.’

‘Perhaps we passed in the street,’ he said.

‘1919!’ she said.

‘Those strange days …’ he murmured.

‘I’d been a nurse,’ she said.

‘I was a soldier,’ he replied, and they looked at each other, and they both knew that they did not want to look back at those times when their countries had just been at war, and at their selves in the shock of survival.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘life is long, if you’re lucky, and who knows – who knows what is coming?’ With which she very much agreed.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The Arco di Tito . Come. I give you a tiny history lesson. So. First Jewish people came to Rome two thousand years ago to ask protection against King of the Syrians, and they stayed. Then later, after destruction of Jerusalem and burning of the temple, Emperor Tito brought Jews back for slaves. Look—’

They were coming up to the great arch, looming against the blue above them.

‘It looks just like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,’ she said.

‘This is the original,’ he said, with a little swagger. ‘See, look inside.’

The vault of the arch was like a slice through a great church or temple: the ornamental ceiling squares and flowers looking almost Tudor, and the carved stone panels at the sides.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You see the menorah? Trumpets?’

She looked. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘And the prisoners carrying them – those are the Jewish prisoners. Jews paid their ransom, and took them into their community – where we still live. Our great great great great etc., etc., grandparents. Good, yes?’

She didn’t know whether to smile or cry.

‘And Tito had a Jewish fidanzata , Queen Berenice. A long long time we have been here.’ They gazed for a while and Nadine thought how little she had ever thought about being Jewish.

As they walked on, he said, ‘Most of Roman Jews won’t walk under that arch. Pride and loyalty. But me, I’m more modern. Not so religious. You?’

‘Not so religious,’ she said.

He took her arm and tucked it into his. ‘Come, my little sister. I buy you an ice cream.’

This full relaxation with this new man in her family made her feel safe, in new territory. A good feeling.

Aldo came in to the kitchen with his trousers wet to the knees again. ‘Forgive my trousers!’ he said. ‘I was fishing in boats—’ and he set down a bucket on the floor. Tom looked into it: thick coils of shining silver, sliding around over and under each other. ‘I make a marinata . Susanna, mi dai l’aceto ! Vinegar, for the marinade. Tommaso, you like to cook?’ He was pulling a sprig of leaves from his pocket. ‘Oh – are you kosher?’

Tom didn’t know what kosher was, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t.

‘Bravo!’ Aldo said. ‘It’s no problem because anyway eels have scales – the rabbi says not, but they do – but I like no religion. Your mother is not religious.’

‘Not in the least,’ said Tom, wondering whether Aldo knew that Nadine was not their actual mother, and staring as Aldo, a cloth round his hand, pulled a yard of big gleaming eel by the tail from the bucket.

‘ Brava !’ cried Aldo. ‘Religion is no good – stand back!’ and he swung the beast through the air, a great silver arc, and thwacked its head with a loud crack on the marble table-top. And again.

‘It’s still alive,’ said Tom, aghast and delighted.

‘No. That is nervous system.’ Now he was tying string round its tail, and hanging it from a hook on the wall.

‘But it’s writhing—’

Aldo was cutting round its neck. ‘Now we skin,’ he said. ‘You take pincer.’

‘But it’s alive—’

‘No,’ and then with a look, Aldo took the eel off the hook again, laid it on Susanna’s wooden chopping board, and with two blows cut its head off.

‘You want to see something?’

Tom wasn’t sure.

Aldo dropped the eel back in the bucket.

Tom peered in.

The eel was swimming around, coiling on itself like before, headless.

Tom stared. He could say nothing.

‘Not magic. Not a miracle,’ Aldo said, with a grin. ‘Science. Nervous system continues. Don’t tell the girls, eh?’ He grabbed the creature again, hitched it back on to its hook and started to rub salt on his hands. ‘It moves again with salt: look—’ and he put his hands to the skin which twitched and wrinkled even as he started to get a purchase on it. ‘Pincer!’ he cried, and Susanna handed him a pair of pliers. Gripping, he began to pull the skin off, a thick tight leathery sleeve. Then ‘Stand back!’ he yelled again, grinning at Tom as he gutted it, strong slashes down the silver abdomen. A little slither of red and blue fell out on to the floor.

Tom blinked.

At supper, Aldo asked what they had done all morning, and Tom, taken off guard, said they had been to see Pasquino the Talking Statue.

‘And did he talk Nenna?’ Aldo asked, and Tom was worried, he wasn’t sure why, that he had betrayed her in some way. But she just laughed and went and stood behind her father, her elbows on his shoulders and her head resting against his, her greeny-gold corkscrews resting on his smoothed-down black ones, while he explained that Pasquino and the other talking statues were all nonsense and superstition, people used to ask them questions, now they stick up leaflets and notices around them. That was all.

‘But there are notices stuck up all over Rome,’ Tom said, thinking of the ones he’d seen, mostly from the government, against communists, who were dangerous and would prevent jobs and wages and food, or from communists and anarchists, against the government. Plus all the ancient ones in Latin, carved into stone.

‘Respectable people sign their notices,’ Aldo explained. ‘People who put things at Pasquino don’t. People say what they want and they aren’t punished.’

Tom was surprised that adults weren’t allowed to say what they wanted, without being punished. He had only come across that before at school.

‘I read some of the notices,’ he said. ‘They weren’t very interesting.’

Upstairs, during the siesta, Tom took his little Italian/English dictionary, and worked out Nenna’s phrase. L’ha detto un ragazzo a scuola . ‘A boy at school said it.’

He put the dictionary in his pocket. He would need it, he thought, during these linguistically challenging days.

Tom and Nenna were not often alone, and the opportunity did not arise for him to pursue the question of the boy at school and the death of Jesus. Out with Kitty, Nadine or the small boys, Nenna introduced them to every stone animal in the neighbourhood, and many others. Later, in the Piazza della Repubblica, she showed them the fountain full of naiads. Each naiad had a creature of her own: a swan, a horse, a monster, a dragon. Which animal, Nenna enquired, do you want? Kitty walked them all the way back practically home, to the turtle-fountain in Piazza Mattei, because she did not know the word for turtle, and Nenna could not get it from her impersonation, waddling round on all fours, poking her head in and out, much to everyone’s amusement. Tom considered telling them that it was a foolish game, but as the idea formed he realised – with a sense of wonder – that he didn’t have to. He wasn’t at school. He wasn’t even at home. He was just with girls, in a foreign country, and he could do whatever he wanted.