calling now is that I’m desperate. As you know, your husband had his way with me during his visit to Bari, and, well, you see, I’ve just found out that I’m…’ How would that sort of woman put it? ‘With child’? ‘Going to be a mother’? ‘Three months gone’? Carla would know, not that it mattered. Rosa would already be back in the kitchen, honing the carving knife to a fine edge. Let Gilberto try to talk his way out of that one!
An amplified voice announced that they would shortly be landing at Fiumicino Airport. Zen consulted Ms watch. It was only an hour since they’d left Catania. They couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Rome yet. That was where his mother lived. She’s dying, Aurelio. Ridiculous. Rome was hundreds of kilometres away. It took hours and hours to get there.
The plane bumped down on the runway, eliciting an enthusiastic round of applause from the passengers, and nosed up to the disembarkation ramp. Everyone stood up and collected their belongings, chatting with almost hysterical volubility to complete strangers about the frightful ordeal they had shared.
‘Never again!’ one man kept saying over and over again in a strident tone. ‘That’s the last time I step on an aeroplane! Never ever again, no matter what happens!’
It wasn’t until the businessman with the bowel problem nudged him meaningfully that Zen realized that everyone was leaving the plane. He got to his feet, lifted his coat down from the locker, and trudged along the aisle to the exit. The captain of the aircraft, in full uniform, was standing slightly to one side, outside the open door to the cockpit.
‘Sorry about the discomfort,’ he told Zen heartily. ‘Worst case of clear air turbulence I’ve ever encountered. Doesn’t show up on the radar, you see. Totally unpredictable. Nothing you can do.’
Zen nodded.
‘No, there’s nothing you can do.’
‘My mother…’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You’re not sure?’
‘No, I mean, I suppose that you could say that she’s alive.’
‘She’s from Randazzo, you said.’
‘No, I said that she lives there. Used to live there.’
‘And now?’
‘Now she doesn’t.’
‘So she moved?’
‘She’s been moved.’
Carla gave an edgy smile.
‘You keep making odd distinctions that I don’t quite get, Corinna.’
The other woman smiled too.
‘It’s a Sicilian speciality. But I’m not trying to hold anything back. I just need to decide how much to tell you, Carla. How much I want to tell you, that is, and how much you really want to know.’
‘I want to know everything!’
‘Oh, everything! Sorry, I’m not handling this right. I’m in love, you see.’
‘In love?’
‘Yes. So I’m behaving a bit oddly. I apologize in advance. The real problem is that I’m not really interested in small talk and brief encounters. That sort of thing can be fun for a while, but you can say the same about television. As I get older, I find I want something more difficult. Something that will challenge the limits of my competence.’
‘How old are you, Corinna?’
‘Thirty-four.’
‘I’m only twenty-three. My mother is dead, and as for my father… He miraculously reappeared, after all those years. It makes a difference, and yet it doesn’t. That’s always assuming that he is my father.’
‘But you had DNA tests done, you said.’
‘I sometimes think he faked them.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Why do people do anything? Half the time they don’t know themselves. Even if they do, their reasons needn’t make sense to anyone else.’
‘You’re an anti-rationalist, then?’
‘I’m a realist. At least, I like to think so.’
‘Then I’ll tell you about my mother, Carla. Let’s test your sense of realism, my dear. I’ll try not to bore you, but to be frank you don’t have much choice but to listen anyway.’
‘I could always leave.’
‘I’m afraid not. As far as my escort are concerned, we’re a package. An item, as they say. As long as I’m here, you have to stay. We arrived together, and we leave together.’
‘I see. I didn’t quite realize what I was letting myself in for by accepting this invitation.’
‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. But in an odd way bondage can be quite liberating, don’t you think?’
‘Liberating?’
‘So many decisions you don’t have to make. At any rate, here’s my mother’s story. Joking aside, I’m not really going to exploit the fact that you’re a captive audience. If you’re bored, just tell me.’
‘Go on.’
‘My mother is from Manchester. A city in England. The second half of the word, “chester”, is cognate with the Latin castrum, a fortified camp. The first syllable is the English word for uomo. My mother once claimed, in one of her rare flashes of humour, that all her troubles stemmed from this fact.’
‘Your mother is English?’
‘She was born in England, of English parents. Well, actually one was Welsh, but I can’t keep track of all these distinctions which seem to be so important there. Anyway, there she was, growing up in Manchester…’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘I have, as it happens.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Impossible to tell you. We don’t have cities like that here. I liked it. I liked the people.’
‘You speak English?’
‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Carla. All in due course.’
‘I’m sorry. So, your mother grew up in… whatever it’s called.’
‘Yes. Her name is Bettina. Betty. When she was sixteen she left school and found work as a waitress somewhere in the centre of town. That’s where she met my father.’
‘He’s English too?’
‘No, he’s from here. He had a job as a deckhand on a freighter out of Catania. It sailed the length of the Mediterranean, crossed the Bay of Biscay, then the Irish Sea, and finally ended up in a canal leading to Manchester. By that time my father had had enough of sleepless nights and puking over the side. He jumped ship, and after a couple of weeks at a sailors’ hostel he found a job washing dishes in a restaurant.’
‘The one where your mother was employed as a waitress.’
‘Brava! And then what?’
‘They fell in love?’
‘Bravissima. Or rather, she did. She was one of three daughters from a working-class family in one of the less attractive areas of the city. She’d never met anyone like Agostino, never even dreamt of doing so, never imagined that there were such people in the world. Confident, precocious and pleasantly pushy, with a permanent tan, coal- black hair, pearly teeth and a charmingly defective command of English which didn’t stop him telling her what to do all the time…’
‘And him?’
‘He’s never told me his side of the story. But I’ve seen photographs of my mother taken at the time, a few snapshots which her parents had kept and which I saw when I went over there. I think for him she must have seemed as exotic as he was for her. Slightly taller than him, with a mass of red hair, lightly freckled skin as white as
