It has been a month since my father left us. Every day, I walk into the town to see if there is a message from him at the telegraph station. He promised that he would try and send word. But each time, there is nothing for me. I remind myself that this does not mean anything in particular. Papa has never been exactly reliable at keeping these sort of promises. And it may simply be too difficult: perhaps he is not allowed to. I know nothing of such things. I know nothing of war, other than what I can hear of it, and what I learn on the radio – none of which is without bias.
The woman in charge of the station, Se?ora Alvarado, is a dour, matronly type with thick spectacles and prominent whiskers that Tino pointed out, once, before I could stop him. She transcribes the messages into blocky pencil capitals, which lends them a certain harshness, as though the words are being shouted. I remember Papa saying that a message of love would lose any romance when transmitted through this hand, read beneath her stern gaze.
Except that I have seen less of this sternness, of late. The first couple of times, when I asked if there were any messages, she shook her head at me impatiently. But now, when I ask, I sense something else. I think it is pity. One time, she asked me about ‘the poor little boy’ – evidently forgetting Tino’s comment about the whiskers. I felt a flare of anger – though I know she only asked out of kindness. Yet I felt that I had been called remiss in some way. As though I don’t spend most of the day worrying about how to keep him safe.
I have inherited Papa’s preoccupation with the radio. I listen whenever Tino is out of hearing range, trying to hear through all the bombast and propaganda the truth of what is going on in Madrid. It hasn’t fallen: that much is clear. If not from the government’s announcements, dubiously optimistic, then from the fact that there are no triumphant broadcasts from the rebels to tell us that they have taken the capital.
I wonder what he is doing now, where he is. I have an idea that if I can conjure an image of him clearly enough, I might be able to convince myself that he is safe. I try to imagine him as a soldier, with a weapon, and find that I can’t. I have only ever seen him in one of his loose shirts, worn thin and soft with age. In his old peasant’s trousers, held up by a finely wrought leather belt: a contrast that exemplifies my father, in all his contradictions. Does he even know how to fire a rifle? Could he kill a man? Because for all his talk of the ‘great fight’, Papa is a gentle man at heart.
It has come at last. A telegram, for me.
And then suddenly I wish it hadn’t. I don’t want to read it. Because, when it is passed to me, Se?ora Alvarado whispers: ‘Lo siento.’
It isn’t from my father – it is from Uncle Salvador. And there, in Se?ora Alvarado’s laboured handwriting, I read that my father is dead.
I have no memory of the walk home: I know only that I seem to arrive back at the farmhouse too quickly. I haven’t had time to prepare myself for what I have to do.
When I reach him he is drawing in his sketchbook, humming something under his breath, his eyes half-closed against the bright light. He looks so content that for a second I hesitate. What if I could somehow delay his pain by not telling him yet? But that is a dangerous way to think. For a moment, I think he hasn’t heard me. He looks up at me, squinting, still with that half-smile on his face. But then: understanding. I see the change happening, moving across his face, across the whole of him. It is like watching something slowly freezing.
12
Cinque Terre
The next morning the sky is clear once more and huge above them: the clouds strung into thin contortions. On one side the coast masses steel grey and dark green, shearing out of the waves.
Riomaggiore, the first of the five towns, reveals itself in this mythic landscape like a practical joke, a sudden exclamation of colour.
They are like sisters, Hal thinks, the towns. Each has her own personality, but they are linked by a definite familial likeness. Manarola – the great beauty, Corniglia, in her clifftop eyrie, Vernazza, with the protective arm of rock shielding her from view, and finally blowsy Monterosso al Mare. They are good-time girls, carnivalesque.
‘You know the reason for the different colours?’
Hal turns, to find the Contessa by his side. He shakes his head.
‘So that every fisherman could know which was his own house when he looked back to shore. And, if he had good eyesight, see that his wife was at home behaving herself.’
They gaze at the spectacle together for a few moments.
‘They’re in the film, aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they exist back then?’ They appear at once new – the vibrancy of the hues, perhaps – and timeless, as though they might have grown across the stone like brightly coloured lichen.
‘Oh yes. Though they were perhaps not in such good repair as you see now. The inhabitants would have been poor country people, you know. But then the Victorians started coming and they got, you might say, a little rouge and powder.