Adam Foulds - In the Wolf's Mouth

One man rose up in the sea, eyes closed, his hands on his head, water pouring down his face and lips and Ray felt the cool of that over his own head, the relief.

Ray’s head burned often, with memories, with fear. But now he would miss the battle. In Sicily he would not really be a soldier any more. He would be part of the peace. George would have liked that for himself but George was not an Italian. Ray had to forget about George now, to let him go. Perhaps it would be better for him to think of him as dead already. Ray twitched at a memory: in the mess of action once he’d had that thought, that everything was dead already, only some of it moved and lived. That wasn’t really going to help. He just had to hang on until it was over. That was all. He had George’s address back home. If they ever got back home, he would get on a bus and use it.

The Princess liked to outpace her guards, to kick up and canter as far from them as she could, making them chase, but here in the motor car there was nowhere to go. One guard sat beside her. He breathed through his nostrils as loudly as a farm animal and bit at the corner of his moustache as he stared out of the window, a pistol on his hip. When she was a little girl there were always more of them, men on the other side of the windows, crouching on the running boards with rifles across their backs. As a child she’d envied them: she wanted to ride on the outside of the car. Now the threat was much diminished but still her father wouldn’t let her travel without at least one to protect her.

In front, the driver in his cap paddled his feet, jerked his levers and turned the wheel. Outside the windows the landscape changed. The bricks and avenues of Palermo gave way to the countryside, the landscape hollowing, rising up into rigid, incessant hills. She was not sad to be leaving the city. It would be good to be out again on horseback with the wind striking her. For a while. This was the task of Luisa’s life: evading boredom in one of two places. She did this by moving arrhythmically between them, taking her friends by surprise in Palermo, going among the feathers and ballrooms and knowing eyes and then suddenly substituting them with the sun and emptiness, the peasants and her father’s travails. There she was free to ride within a certain range, as long as she was accompanied and kept away from the malevolent edge of the country that was always there, encircling. She sensed it looking out of the motor car. The landscape was vigilant. It knew things. It could see her.

In a walled garden in Palermo, by a pond in which large goldfish slowly twisted, rising and fading, a Fascist mayor had told Princess Luisa that there was absolutely nothing to be worried about, that the party had smashed those backward rural criminals. He had jutted out his chin in a ridiculous imitation of the Duce. All the Fascists these days strutted and posed like him even as a light sheen of panic appeared on their faces. At parties aristocrats from the old families caught each other’s eyes and shared this observation. They themselves felt confident, monumental, historically vindicated, while the Fascists struck attitudes and drank and spoke too much. The effect of events in North Africa on Luisa’s own pet Fascist, Mauro, a Tuscan of refined, not to say pretty, features, was to make him more ardent. He wanted to marry her.

Mauro Vecchio was the prefect of Sant’Attilio, a part of the island he confided in her that he found squalid and incomprehensible. The best of Sicily was the east, where the Greeks had been. The half-Arab peasants of the west could not be made political. It wouldn’t take, any more than you could teach pigs to speak Latin. You could move the feeding trough, make them trot in a different direction, and that was as far as it went. Luisa’s father disliked him for these opinions, the Prince having a peculiar, dimly Tolstoyan reverence for the tough local people that somehow survived his dealings with them. Mauro and her father liked to argue it out in the persons of The Future and The Old Wisdom. Now, it seemed her father had won the argument. Mauro had retreated to Palermo and Luisa suspected he would never return, although as he drove with her to the city in his official car, he had promised her that he would, no matter what happened.

The conversation on the bouncing back seat of the car was a long coda to the conversation in the garden. Sitting on the pedestal of one of the statues, Mauro had looked up squinting against the light and asked Luisa to marry him. The answer, of course, was no, although Luisa could not have said why the ‘of course’ was so immediate and definitive. She liked Mauro. He was always entertaining in his silk shirts and boots, declaring things. He was ardent, about her, about Italy. But there was something she was sure she should have felt that she didn’t. It was a kind of terror that she wanted to feel, her solitude broken open, a fiery golden tearing into the centre of her by the man who would then have the right to marry her, and that she had never felt.

In Palermo, Mauro had sent messages to the apartment in the palace where she stayed with her cousins (the Prince having long since rented out his Palermo residence to his nephews). She had replied only insincerely, with jokes and exhortations to courage. She had met the usual people and done the usual things in an atmosphere now effervescent with the closeness of war. Until, that is, being there had bored her and she’d left.

Arriving home, the driver got out, trotted around and opened the door for Luisa. The guard waited and walked behind. Luisa saw Angilù walking from the main door towards the wing of estate management rooms. He stopped where he was and lifted his hat, almost as though he was showing her his balding head, a little surprise he kept for her. Angilù wouldn’t have understood this comical thought, he was always so serious and hard-working. The Princess waved at him, allowing him to walk away.

Into the lion’s mouth, the echoing hallway where the dogs came out to greet her, claws scrabbling on the tiles. She rummaged briefly among their furry necks and sides, their warm, damp breath, before walking through to her father’s study. Presumably Angilù had just come from there. The image of him standing outside, subordinate, his hat uplifted, stuck in her mind for some reason. She found him a frustrating man. He’d been working with her father, around the house, for almost twenty years and he always kept such a pious distance from her. Only once, when she was a girl, she remembered, he’d treated her like one of his own children. Luisa used to follow him around, pursuing him at his work. She was playing outside with some kind of seeds that he needed, tossing them onto the ground, and he’d grabbed hold of her, handling her roughly, and scolded her. She had been so shocked and outraged at this unprecedented behaviour that she had wailed with scarlet anger. She could still see the fear that had appeared in his eyes, the desperate effort to placate her before anyone else saw. After that assertion of her will, Angilù had kept away. When she followed him, he ignored her respectfully. Luisa felt at odd moments abandoned by him still, his veneration of her a kind of denial. She would have liked to talk to him sometimes, she imagined he knew interesting things, but he was mute. She could have asked him questions and he would have been forced to answer, but it was not the same.

Her father was sitting in his red armchair with the wireless on, his gaze resting in midair, a slightly foolish look of cogitation on his face. Cigarette smoke was rising slowly along his arm and up from his head. It rolled with turbulence when he saw her and moved. ‘Ah, my dear.’ He stood up. ‘One moment.’ He went over to the wireless, a waist-high cabinet elaborate with honey-coloured grilles, and switched it off.