Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

No, she will not worry yet. His absence is not alarming, and is never held against him. Those nights he stays out, if Lydia is gone the next morning about her business or to the Mill café with a friend, there’s always a new loaf of bread set out on the table for the prodigal husband.

The church of San Lorenzo smells of cherry wood and juniper smoke. In the cool solemnity is the ancient mortuary perfume of old women and the dripping baptismal tears of little babies. As Annette approaches the altar she feels the evil gaze upon her, compelling her face to tilt upwards, instead of down into the position of sacramental humility. The priest clears his throat. He administers the body of Christ, which tastes of bulrushes. The host dissolves on her tongue, cobwebs between her teeth, vanishing as if it were never there. She prays for her mother, for Uncle Marcello and her brothers, including Vincenzo, who has emigrated to South America, and Andrea in Turin.

Father Mencaroni speaks of the fasting of Saint Catherine. How she took slow joy in the peeling of the orange, how she rubbed one segment of its flesh against her gums and teeth. How this simple ritual was enough for her. God’s devotion sustained her, he says, not mortal appetites. Mauri shuffles in the pew and sighs. He unwraps chewing gum inside his pocket and Annette hears the wet popping of his jaw as he begins to work it. He reaches over and tickles Annette’s arm, then pinches it. ‘Quick, Tarantella, dance, dance!’ he whispers. Tommaso is kicking his shoes together and giggling. Somebody in the pew behind shushes them.

Though her brothers are light-hearted, there is an ill force in the air. Annette feels it against her face, a sensation like pushing into the damp, heavy wool hanging in the courtyard when the bedding is washed. From the gilt cage above the altar rail he is still watching her. He is watching her through her clothing, and his tongue is flicking at the buttons on the hem of her dress.

After mass, Annette greets those who call to her and ask about her mother. ‘Not with you again today?’ ‘Mamma is sick,’ she explains. ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ On the stone steps of San Lorenzo, as they wait for Father Mencaroni to press their hands, she hears snippets of conversation not intended for her ears. ‘Keep her uneducated…very pretty if you don’t consider…surely a brassiere now…yes, yes…beautiful arrangements…such humiliation…the mistress…in prison.’ Tommaso holds her skirt and winds round and round her, twisting the material into a tight tourniquet. Then he swaps hands and winds round the other way. Maurizio says he is tired of waiting and is going to swim in the lake with friends. ‘Netta, I’m going to take off all my clothes and lie flat on a rock,’ he whispers. ‘What do you think about that piece of information?’ Then he makes a fist with a hand and rests it on the crown of Annette’s head. With the other hand he taps it, as if breaking an egg, and gently his hand opens and his palm slithers through her scarf and her hair. She pulls his elbows down to his sides. ‘Stop. It’s disgusting.’ Mauri puts his hands into his pockets and she hears him slouch off down the steps.

When it is hot Maurizio swims in the lake or lies in the tall grass with his shirt off, turning dark brown. When he comes home his skin smells of chaff and lake water and the musk of the sun. Sometimes he walks to the viaduct and smokes cigarettes and then chews mint. He and the other boys hold on to the lower beams and wait for a train to pass overhead and shake their bones, seeing who will be the last to drop. They look at magazines that stay hidden between the girders. At these meetings they discuss important things, he tells Annette, like measurements and speed and strikers. They go to watch films like the Torn Curtain and The Dreamers. The girl who works at the cinema selling tickets is very pretty. Maurizio says she is in love with him, and that she has offered to show him her secret garden.

Meanwhile Annette must look after Tommaso, taking him to the greenhouses or to the cimitero di campagna where they pay respects to their father. This is their duty and their responsibility. Their oldest brother, Andrea, is married and has children of his own. In Turin he works at the Fiat factory. Before that he worked at the Coca-Cola factory. Before that, a precision-tool factory. Vincenzo has been in Argentina for several years: ‘the land of forgetting’ their mother calls it, sniffing loudly, whenever she talks about his desertion.

It is pointless, her mother says, for Annette to go to the cinema and pay money for a film she can’t watch but can only hear. She may as well listen to the radio, which is free. And the mezzanine is too dangerous, and such a suggestive venue is not a suitable environment for an innocent girl. Italian films now contain lewdness and violence, and American films are filled with prostitutes and criminals with guns. ‘I cannot be sure what influence they will have on you,’ she says. Then she sighs. ‘Joseph used to take me to watch Garbo, but that’s finished now.’ When Annette asks why Mauri is allowed to see prostitutes on the screen her mother says he may watch them because he knows how to confess and cleanse his conscience. God knows to forgive men for their primitive urges, she says. He has been doing this for centuries.

More importantly, Annette is forbidden to swim in the lake. She is to keep her legs covered and to wear a headscarf if she ever goes near the water. There are giant eels that can smell the scent of girls from the depths and will slither out from under the rocks to attack them. ‘No one has ever been attacked by a giant eel, Rosaria!’ Uncle Marcello protests when Annette’s mother begins with her underwater fable. ‘At least not in a lake. What kind of nonsense is this for the girl to believe in!’ But her mother is resolute. There is to be no swimming.

Instead, Annette and Tommaso visit the cimitero di campagna. Their father has been dead a long time, long enough for their mother to put away her cowled dress were she to choose to. Annette remembers only his neat moustache, trimmed down exactly from his nose so that it formed a thin orderly hedge on his lip. His work boots were heavily soiled. His street shoes were always polished. His eyes were as green as river algae and he was handsome. Uncle Marcello has the same green eyes, but he has a weaker chin, according to her mother. Her father was Marcello’s older brother but, her mother says, in spirit he was much younger.

Tommaso remembers nothing of their father. He was just a baby when he died. He likes visiting the old walled enclosure at the top of the flight of steps on the outskirts of the town, in the same way he likes bicycling, football, learning new songs at the Montessori and writing stories.

He takes off his shoes and they walk up the steep, foot-polished steps together. The heat collects in the wings and wells of stone; Tommaso says he can feel it on his bare toes. He counts the steps. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight. He must place both feet on every step or it does not count, he tells Annette. At the top, sixty-two, he has an announcement to make. He would like to race in the Tour de France. He is going to begin training tomorrow. He will eat only raw eggs to prepare. He will drink only goat’s milk. He will require a striped, tight-fitting jersey with the number 6 stitched to the back. This is how old he is, and it is also his lucky number.

Around the shady grove, the trees hiss and rustle. Annette opens the gate with a creak, and they enter the small city of the dead, with its roofs and chambers, its walls of remembrance and its fenced tombs. She gathers the dried flowers from the niche where her father’s handsome, moustachioed photograph resides. The blooms crumble and disintegrate like ash. She puts new cuttings into the little tin canister. The last of the white roses, and white cultivated cyclamens whose hearts are bigger than the cyclamens under the olive trees in the hills. ‘Why doesn’t he wash off in the rain?’ Tommaso asks.