Read Online Solitaria by Genni Gunn - Free Book Online Page B

the air. She picked up a broom and tried to squash everything against the ceiling.
    â€œMamma, wait until we’re gone, per carità ,” Papà said. He took the broom from her and leaned it in a corner of the room. “You’d better feed Vito.”
    Mamma smiled and took out two slices of bread from a wrapping of brown paper. She poured a thimbleful of oil onto the top of each and spread it. Then she handed the slices to Papà and Vito.
    In the field, their bare feet were the colour of volcanic tufa, their hair stiff and chalky, and in their mouths, the air itself tasted like plaster. They gathered tobacco leaves until dark, then stacked them in a corner of the room. Most days, we children would thread them into long garlands, which Mamma would hang to dry in the sun. By today, in the perfect humidity of the siroccos — when the leaves did not crumble under our fingers — we stacked them into wooden boxes left by tobacco agents, who would come and collect them at dawn.
    That night in the windowless attic, while Clarissa and I slept — me curled on my side, Clarissa on her back, arm flung above her head — Vito lay awake on the thin mattress beside us. He waited for his pupils to dilate so he could see the dark shapes of people, things. Beside him, Aldo yawned, his face turned to the wall. The wind howled against the hut, hot with moisture. Vito stared into the darkness and listened to our parents in the bed across the room.
    â€œHe’ll be all right, “ Papà said, “once he gets to know us again.”
    â€œBut he seems so… serious,” Mamma said.
    â€œHe was always serious,” Papà said.

    The village piazza formed a square around a water pump which jutted out of a stone basin and was flanked by a greengrocer and a butcher shop on one side, a bakery and tobacconist on the other, a church on the third side, and the village school on the fourth. The latter was a one-room rectangle of piled tufa blocks, its windows open to the sticky air. Inside, children recited in unison the multiplication tables, their eyes languid, their voices monotone and resigned. Outside, the sun cast almost no shadow. Farmers walked silently home, their faces wet with sweat. The village grocer locked up, as did the butcher and the baker. Only the tobacconist stayed open for another half hour. It could have been a black-and-white sequence, an Italian film: sullen young men on bicycles; coquettish, defiant young women leaning against the stoops of windowless huts; old men seated on chairs in the maws of doorways; children squatting in the narrow streets; donkeys braying, and chickens underfoot, squawking and pecking the dirt. Southern Italy in a perpetual cycle of poverty, abandoned by Rome, by the rest of the country, backwards and rural, superstitious and alien. In close-ups, there were immense watery black eyes, wizened cheeks, dumb animal stares. Everyone in black and white, ambiguous, so that one was never quite sure who was doing what to whom.
    A trumpet blared. The tobacconist emerged from his shop, carrying a large speaker, which he set on the bench outside. He was a squat little man, with a bald head hidden under a hat. He turned back in and emerged moments later with a large framed photograph of Mussolini that he leaned against the bench, and a shortwave radio, which he plugged into the speaker. Villagers flowed out of their houses, unhurried, and stood in clumps in the piazza. A man rounded the corner with a handful of small paper fans bearing the name of his clothing store. He distributed these among the women, who gratefully accepted and waved them like butterflies in the air.
    A bell pealed. The school door opened and the teacher stepped out. She stood like a sentinel beside the open door. Over her skirt and blouse she wore the school uniform now mandatory throughout Italy — a black smock, its white, starched, Peter Pan collar askew. Children filed carefully past