Page 48 of Daughter of Genoa
Vittorio
He didn’t know what he’d expected to hear, but it wasn’t this. He’s hurt and shocked and angry, just as he promised not to be, and he mustn’t show it. All he can do is sit with her and listen, and act like the man he desperately wants to be. The man he wants to be for her.
‘My husband… he didn’t react very well when your father let me go,’ Marta is saying now. Her shoulders collapse. ‘I loved Stefano very much and he loved me, but…’
‘Go on,’ Vittorio prompts. He already dislikes this Stefano.
‘He didn’tunderstand,’ she bursts out. ‘Not really, not properly. He knew I hated it there, and he knew that I was afraid. He knew how much I missed my family and he knew – I thought he knew – what a big compromise I had made for him. Every single day I went to work for your father was a sacrifice by the end, even the days when he was perfectly pleasant and didn’t do or say anything nasty at all. Because I never knew when he would, you see, and I was always bracing myself. Every day I was a little more…’
‘You were brutalised,’ Vittorio says, thinking of the father he grew up with: the capricious autocrat, the dark shadow in the home.
‘Yes, that’s just it. I was brutalised. Some days I had to come home and go straight to bed. And Stefano would take care of me – he’d do everything to make me feel better, but then he’d say: “Hang on just a little bit longer, darling. We’re so close to our goal.” And that’s the thing – wewereclose. He had just one exam left to take. We almost had what we needed to go to America, like he promised we would, and be with my parents and my brother, and…’
Her cheeks are wet. She scrubs at them with the back of her hand. ‘I’d done everything,’ she goes on. ‘I’d done everything I could, and there wasn’t anything more to do. There just wasn’t. He’d told me over and over again how happy his own parents would be when he got this fantastic job over there, the one he was sure his degree would get him. We’d done everything by ourselves up to that point and we hadn’t asked for help from them at all. I thought we could ask now. That’s the thing about growing up in a nice, happy family,’ she says with the ghost of a smile. ‘You rather think all parents are like yours. Mine would have insisted on helping, would have sent whatever they could scrape together, but I knew they were only just surviving. My brother was picking up menial jobs where he could and studying in the evenings. My mother was teaching English to immigrant families. My father had a job at the City College, and he loved it – but his health was getting worse, and so were his doctors’ bills. No, I couldn’t ask them.’
‘But Stefano’s parents would help?’ he asks, and she sighs.
‘No. Stefano refused even to ask. He said that going to them for help would be a failure. They’d see it that way, and so would he. He wanted to keep on managing all by himself.’
‘But he wasn’t managing all by himself,’ Vittorio says, indignant. ‘He was managing because of you.’
‘That’s what I told him,’ she says. ‘I screamed it at him, in fact. I hate raising my voice, but I did then, because I was at the end of my tether. The worst part is that he didn’t even shout back. He looked at me as if I were quite stupid, and said something he’d never, ever said to me before.’ She takes a breath. ‘He was the one with the career, he said. He was the one with the name, the connections, the prospects. It was because of him, he said, that me and my parents wouldn’t end up rotting in filth, crammed together in some New York slum. He didn’t say I should be grateful that he’d taken me on, that I was worth less than he was. He didn’t have to say it.’
Vittorio wants to go to her, gather her up in his arms. He wants to kiss away her tears. He wants to tell her that she is worth more than anything or anyone in the world, certainly to him.
He holds out his hand, palm up, and she takes it.
‘He was right in one way, though,’ she says. ‘I was stupid. I should never have stayed with him in the first place, and I shouldn’t have kept on staying. You know, my mother – she would never have stopped me – but she said to me a few times before she and my father left:You know you can still come with us.’ She speaks the words in English and there’s a cadence to her voice, a genteel Scottish lilt. ‘If you want to stay, then of course you must stay. But you can change your mind – you know that, don’t you? There’s no shame if you do.Do you know what that was? That was a lifeline. My mother offered me a lifeline and I didn’t take it.’
‘But you couldn’t have known what was coming,’ Vittorio says. ‘Could you? That must have been years before the Racial Laws.’
She nods. ‘That was in thirty-four.’
‘Well, then. And you couldn’t have known about my father, either. I’m sure he was very charming at first. Perfectly easy to deal with until the moment when… well, when he wasn’t any more. I’ve seen him do that many times: to servants, to employees, to my own mother.’ He’s warming to his theme now. He squeezes her hand and she gives him a faint smile. ‘How could you possibly have known what he was until you were already in his grasp? How could you know what the government would do? Marta, you can’t blame yourself for a decision you took when you were very young and in love, and you can’t blame yourself for trying to make the best of that decision. You mustn’t. There was so much you didn’t know until it was too late.’
‘But I might have known what Stefano was like.’ Her voice is quiet, steady. ‘I married a man I barely knew and I thought that just because he was in love with me, he would also be my friend. I thought that he’d understand me, value me, just like my mother valued my father. I believed that was the very basis of love. And that, Father Vittorio, was a dreadfully stupid mistake.’
*
He keeps hold of her hand while the story unfolds. Stefano would not go and talk to his parents, and Marta’s attempts to plead with him only hardened his resolve. He was determined to talk to the commendatore instead. (‘How I hate that title,’ she says. ‘A knighthood for services to Fascist industry. But it was so perfectly him. He used it with everyone.’) He was sure that he could make him see sense and give Marta her job back. The fact that she didn’t want it back was, of course, neither here nor there.
Marta had known – just as Vittorio knows – that this was a bad idea. But nothing she said could persuade him not to do it.
‘He was simply convinced of being in the right. And he believed that your father would listen to him, because they were both men, and from the same class – well, no, his family was older and better than yours. Sorry, Father Vittorio. I tried to tell him that the commendatore would never, ever tolerate someone questioning his judgement. Especially a younger man, andespeciallyone from an old-established family. You know how he is.’
Vittorio nods. ‘All too well.’
‘And you can probably imagine how it went.’
His stomach twists. ‘I think I can.’
‘Stefano came back from that meeting quite changed,’ she says with a small, bitter laugh. ‘He was shell-shocked. He kept saying: “I had no idea how vile that man is. Sweetheart, can you ever forgive me?” And I rather had to, in the moment – though I didn’t forget that I’d told him plenty of times exactly what your father was like, and he hadn’t listened. Anyway, now he was convinced that we must go and speak to his parents. I believe he even thought it was his idea. He was nervous, of course. Captain Pastorino, his father, was rather a forbidding man. But we sat together and rehearsed all the reasons why they should help him. None of them involved me or my family; that was simple common sense. It was all about him making a brilliant career abroad, just like the captain had as a young man. Bringing glory to the family name in a new field, that sort of thing. They were perfectly sound reasons and, in any other circumstances, I’m sure they would have worked. But it was already too late.’
Her hand is chilly in his, fragile and still like a dead bird. He doesn’t know what she’s going to tell him, but he knows it’s something terrible and he knows, with a dreadful certainty, who is behind it.
‘What did he do?’ he asks. ‘What did my father do? Tell me, Marta, please. Don’t hold back. You must tell me everything.’
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