Page 17 of This Vicious Hunger
Leonardo strikes me as the kind of man who would struggle to let the women around him do his mourning for him, though I’d never say this aloud. He is gentler than most men I’ve met before in my life. He takes off his spectacles and wipes the lenses on the sleeve of his shirt beneath his robe.
“If you want to tell me,” I add, speaking quickly. “You don’t have to. I know you don’t really know me—”
“She left.” Leonardo stirs his already-cool stew but doesn’t eat much. I wait. “She… I don’t really know what happened. She was the one who pushed me to become a scholar. I met her just after I finished my undergraduate degree. I was torn between going to work with my father—it’s a good living but neither of my parents really wanted that—and continuing here. Almerto approached me about continuing my studies and Clara was so very supportive. She even came to live with me.”
“At St. Elianto?”
“Yes. You probably don’t know this, but they have rooms to the west that are larger, better suited to family living. It’s where most of the professors live with their wives.”
“I’ve never seen another woman anywhere except in the dining hall.”And the garden.Though this feels different, so I don’t say it.
“They don’t mingle.” Leonardo shakes his head, finally tucking into more than a tiny bite of stew. “It’s absolutely not the done thing. But they have a little community, sort of a campus within the campus, with a greengrocer’s and on-site restaurant. Most of the women don’t work—”
“But those who do are servers here, right?”
I glance guiltily back towards the server who refused to seat me—not the same girl as on my first day, but they all look kind of similar after a while—and a hollow forms in my belly. I’d assumed most of these women were from the village. I cringe inwardly. It shouldn’t matter where they’re from, they’re still women, and that’s one vital lesson I didn’t expect to receive over dinner.
“Right. Some of them like the independence, and the professors like to keep it in the family, as it were. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a worse job, dealing with hungry scholars all the time.”
“Not least the ones like me who make horses’ asses of themselves by being rude.”
Leonardo’s face softens from amusement to kindness. “Don’t beat yourself up,” he says softly. “It’s a big change for you. Most of the men in this hall have been bred and born and raised to know that they’ll spend several years of their lives in a place like this—and many of the scholars’ wives are also scholars’ daughters or sisters. Education runs in the family, and they’restillwary about you joining our ranks. So you’re not the only one with prejudices.”
I shift uncomfortably. Leonardo might be right, but that doesn’t change the way I’ve been acting. You’d think after my first day here I’d have learned. I can blame Aurelio for a lot of things, but not all of them.
“So your wife liked living here?”
“Oh, she loved St. Ellie.” Leonardo smiles, but there’s no heat in it. “She’d be out every day walking the grounds. She loved to walk! Lord, she’d never stop. Dinner was always late or burnt, but she always had a collection of fresh flowers for the vase and lemons from the trees. A year after she joined me here, things startedto change. She got distant. I started to think she was having second thoughts about staying here. My mentorship with Professor Almerto was only newly underway, and I don’t know if she maybe decided that a few years was all she could take and that an indefinite tenure was too much?
“I thought about teaching,” he adds. “At first. It was my main motivator really. Maybe here, or maybe back in Scandessa, where Clara and I are from. And then I got into things with Almerto and I was enjoying taking all these different classes. It’s so different from when I was a young thing, always choosing my lectures based on what they couldgiveme. Now I choose based on interest alone. I dabble in arts and science and photography and psychology… What?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Your face changed.”
“No, sorry. I was just thinking. Petaccia has me taking all these classes and I wasn’t sure what the point was. I’m a scientist. I’ve read books on everything else, but science is my truest love. So why waste all that time? She said that life breathes science, which I understand logically, but not emotionally—but then you talk about it as if itsfreedomand you’re right.”
“Oh.” Leonardo tilts his head. “Yeah, learning for the sake of learning is my favourite kind. I guess Clara didn’t agree with me, though.”
“So… she just left? Without saying anything?”
“It wasn’t so straightforward. I was really busy with some paperwork and prep for Almerto’s spring classes, and Clara was distant butfine. Vaguely I started noticing her coming home later, long after dinner, but I thought maybe she’d just made friends with some of the other wives. She was out so late, though, and shealways smelled so strange… I didn’t really pay enough attention. I was distracted. And then she was gone.”
I let the silence sit for a minute while we both eat. It feels wrong to talk about Leonardo’s wife, or speculate on her motives, when I know him so little.
“I didn’t realise you’d done your three years here before working with Almerto,” I say eventually. “You always struck me as kind of…”
“What?”
“Kind of hapless.” I laugh, and fortunately so does he.
“I suppose I deserve that one. But, yes, I’ve been here for, what, five years now? With a little break in between.”
“You must know the campus well, then. I’m still finding my way. I’ve heard there are two libraries? I’ve only been able to find the one. And that little box of free books in the square, but that’s not what people are talking about, is it?”
“No, there is another one—right by the gates. It’s sort of hidden. Kind of useless unless you’ve got an in with one of the librarians, because the sorting system is absolutely bonkers. It’s worth a visit, though, if you know what you’re looking for and can find a way to ask without offending any of them.”
“I’ll give that a go, maybe once I’ve settled in a bit more, then, if my relationship with the serving staff is anything to go by. I’m learning a lot since I got here. My husband was a society man and he tried his best to teach me, but I guess I’m still a little rough around the edges.”
