Page 41 of Daughter of Genoa (Escape to Tuscany)

Vittorio

Silvia was right about the tonic. After just two days, it’s relieved the insatiable exhaustion and finally allowed him to sleep deeply and well, with a satisfaction he hasn’t felt in months.

The problem is, that’s all he wants to do.

He doesn’t meditate, or examine his conscience, or pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

He doesn’t work in the library. He doesn’t wash himself or shave.

He can only pick at the meals don Francesco has sent up to him on a tray; he rarely remembers to drink, and even more rarely uses the lavatory.

He stays cradled in sleep, waking only in extremis: when his bladder irks him, when his joints hurt, when his father looms large in his dreams. Then he wakes with a start and a gasp, and lies there staring into the dark while his pulse races and patterns dance before his eyes.

Sometimes the dream lingers like a miasma, and he feels that his father is actually in the room with him, a glowering presence at the end of his bed.

Vittorio knows it isn’t real – that the brain plays these tricks sometimes.

But he still has to say a prayer against evil before he can sleep again.

On the third night, his father is there more and more.

On the fourth night, he won’t leave. Vittorio prays endless decades of the rosary; he begs St Michael the Archangel to protect him; he turns over and presses his face into the mattress, clamps the pillow over his head, but the vile angry Thing is still there.

Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, why have you forsaken me?

When the morning bell rings, he washes, shaves and dresses and goes out into the corridor.

The community is silent. The priests are silent, of course: that’s the order of things.

An hour’s private meditation before the day’s business can begin, each in his separate room.

When was the last time he observed that rule?

Vittorio can’t remember. He isn’t very sure what he’s going to do now, for that matter.

He knows only that he needs air, and light, and to be away from his room and that sickening presence.

He gets into the elevator and goes down to the ground floor, to the door at the back of the church.

Outside, it’s quiet. Via San Lorenzo is lined with German cars, but the Germans themselves are scarce.

Curfew is barely over and they clearly don’t expect trouble, not at this time of day.

Only a small group of soldiers, loitering together outside the Palazzo Ducale, cast him an uninterested glance as he begins to walk down the road towards the seafront.

Because it’s that he needs to see; he knows that now.

He knows it’s been destroyed, reduced to rubble by bomb after bomb after bomb – from the air, from the sea – and the Marinaio shipyard must surely have been destroyed too.

Perhaps if he can see that it’s gone, his father will stop haunting him and he’ll have some peace.

The old port is ahead of him. He can’t see the sea yet – there are buildings in the way – but he can smell it.

He should really turn left down dark, narrow via Chiabrera, cut a few minutes out of his walk, but he wants to stay out in the open and look at the water.

That’s something he missed in Rome and London; even in Genoa, he doesn’t get enough of it.

And so he keeps on walking until he reaches the arched gallery of piazza della Raibetta, and he turns left and follows the ravaged line of the seafront; pausing for a moment when the flat, silvery sea comes into view, letting himself take it in.

He walks and walks, following the railway tracks until he reaches the point where Marinaio e Figli should be, but there’s nothing.

No bombed-out buildings, no broken signage or abandoned hulls.

The only sign that this was ever a shipyard is a right-angled slipway that extends, ruined and half-submerged, out into the water.

Vittorio stands and looks at the empty place that once housed his father’s pride, and he waits to feel something: relief, perhaps, or compassion, or triumph.

But he can’t feel anything except a rising nausea.

He’s aware, standing here in the pale morning sun, that he hasn’t eaten or drunk since the previous afternoon.

The sickness keeps coming; his head swims, and the ground beneath him starts to tilt and sway like a boat on rough waters.

Someone grabs his arm. ‘Easy, son,’ a voice says – his father’s voice, the voice of his nightmares.

Vittorio stumbles back, but the Thing has hold of him.

His free hand goes to the rosary that hangs from his cincture, seizing the crucifix with shaking fingers, pressing the Lord’s agonised body into the clammy flesh of his palm.

It’s looking at him, the Thing. It’s looking him right in the eye.

It’s older and stouter and pinker and whiter than the Thing that haunts his room, but it’s still his father, and its grip feels solid and strong.

He tries to pull away and it pulls him back again, its fingers almost crushing his wrist, and he knows that this is something worse than an apparition.

‘Calm down, won’t you?’ the commendatore says, and rolls his bloodshot eyes. ‘Christ’s sake, you’d think I were the Devil himself.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Vittorio asks. There’s a tremor in his voice that he can’t still.

‘Same as you, probably. Looking at the wreck of your lost inheritance – and yes, I know you didn’t want it; you don’t have to tell me again.

Will you stop that?’ he says irritably as Vittorio squirms in his grasp.

‘I’m just trying to keep you upright. I don’t know what the Jesuits have been doing to you, but you look half-dead. Come and sit down.’

Still gripping Vittorio’s wrist, he guides him to where a pile of shattered stonework and broken girders has been assembled, ready for clearing. He settles Vittorio onto one of the girders and looks around for a place to sit himself, finally perching on a flattish piece of concrete.

‘Now, you stay,’ he commands, and takes out a flat silver flask from inside his jacket. Silver flask, English tweed. Like Fulvio, but he isn’t like Fulvio at all. He unscrews the cap and thrusts it under Vittorio’s nose; the florid smell of brandy makes his gorge rise.

‘No, thank you. I’d rather not—’

‘ Drink ,’ the commendatore orders, and he lifts the flask to his lips. The alcohol hits the back of his throat and his stomach churns; he bucks forward and vomits up thin green bile, narrowly missing his father’s right shoe.

‘Damn it to hell,’ his father barks, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

Beneath the weakness and the confusion and the layers of deep-instilled, reflexive fear, something in Vittorio snaps. He takes a cautious sip of the brandy – it stings his throat, but it goes down this time, and stays down, and fills him with a spreading warmth.

‘I’m dying,’ he says. ‘That’s what’s wrong with me.’

His father is staring at him – Vittorio can feel his eyes boring into the side of his face. He takes another sip of brandy and looks ahead, at the horizon.

‘What d’you mean, you’re dying?’ the commendatore splutters. ‘Dying how? Of what?’

‘Tuberculosis, probably.’ There’s a strange delight in being casual, in dropping these words so they hang in the air between them. ‘Or it could be cancer, or heart failure. But it’s most likely TB. I had it before.’

‘I know you had it before. I got you the best doctors, the best treatments. You cost me a bloody fortune and they all assured me that you were better.’

‘I’m sure I was, at the time. It can’t be cured, though,’ Vittorio says. ‘It can only go dormant. It did, obviously, and now it’s back. I’m surprised your doctors didn’t tell you that,’ he adds.

He knows his father won’t dare explode at him.

He’s far too conscious of his reputation to unleash his anger in public; and the city is waking up now, cars and trucks filtering past on the road behind them.

But he’s still surprised when the commendatore shakes his head and says softly: ‘That’s terrible.

Christ, son, you could have told us. Your poor mother. ’

Vittorio hangs his head. It’s always painful to think of his mother: his sweet, vague mother who never did anything wrong, though as a boy he’d sometimes longed for her to speak up, to intervene when he was the one being terrorised. But then he grew up and left her.

His father puts a hand on his forearm. ‘How long have you…’ The commendatore clears his throat. ‘How long have you got? Have they told you?’

‘I don’t know. Not long.’

‘What does that mean? Months, weeks?’

‘Weeks,’ Vittorio says, but he knows it might be days.

The commendatore swears under his breath.

His hand is heavy, a manacle on Vittorio’s arm.

‘You’ll come home, then. You’ll come home and you’ll…

we’ll look after you there. You’ll be comfortable,’ he says, and his voice trembles so that Vittorio has to look away.

‘We’ll make sure of it, your mother and I.

Your brothers and sister will want to see you, too. You won’t deny them that.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘I’m not asking,’ his father says, and there’s a touch of the old steel. ‘I’m not leaving you like this. You’re coming home. I’ve got the car and I’ll take you there now.’

Say no , Vittorio urges himself. Pull yourself together and say no .

But there’s something so tempting about the idea: dying in a soft bed in his family’s villa at Albaro, perhaps in his old bedroom with the high ceiling and the trees outside the window.

No more lies, no more deception, no more obligations left unfulfilled.

And there’s a part of him – the part that’s still a wounded little boy – that thrills to the tremor in his father’s voice.

He wants to be loved. He wants to be looked after.

He wants, for a dizzying moment, to forget everything.