“Then you send us your Lucrezia, and we will show her zabaione, we will teach her not to turn it into lumps like scrambled eggs!”
But when sorrow had come upon them—and to Fabio shame as well—they had ceased to nag each other for the moment. They had turned away their eyes, while their hearts grew kind and shy, neither had wished to see the sorrow of the other. They had found no words, or if they spoke they did so fearfully, timid of saying the wrong thing. And when Lucrezia died, Fabio sent a wreath of iris, so large that it ousted all the other floral tributes. And when Olga died, Nerone sent a splendid cross of roses, and: “I will have them white, all white,” he told the florist.
V
No sooner had Gian-Luca found his tongue, than he found his feet with a vengeance; there were setbacks, of course, but to all intents and purposes he quickly became a biped. His adventures increased and multiplied, leading him now into strange, alluring places: the backyard, for instance, where the empty cases stood, festooned with flue and smuts. These empty packing-cases attracted him greatly; they were dirty, they were hollow, and queer, fantastic labels, together with all sorts of scrawls and lines and crosses appeared on their battered sides. To do them justice, they were very wise old cases, having travelled with aplomb all the way from Italy. Gian-Luca, of course, was not aware of this, still he felt that there was something about them … This conviction of his grew and grew, until he longed for a fuller communion, a communion only to be properly attained by filling the void with himself. Into the lowest and kindest of the cases Gian-Luca heaved his minute proportions, to discover—as occasionally happens—that in life it is simpler to get in than to get out, and this revelation when it came was terrific; he was rescued half an hour later by Teresa; still, there had been that half-hour—
At about this time they weaned him from Rosa, and Gian-Luca made his first acquaintance with sorrow. Rosa came daily to push his perambulator, but Rosa, without the comfort of her breasts, was not Rosa to him any more. She seemed cold and aloof; “tout passe, tout lasse …” but naturally Gian-Luca did not know this fact as yet. Though Gian-Luca sorrowed, yet his Rosa rejoiced, she no longer splashed him with tears; if her lips trembled now they did so with smiles, any more, she was constantly laughing. “I will bring you a little new friend, one day soon!” she had taken to whispering in his ear; and sometimes she led him into a church, and sat clicking her rosary just above his nose, while he kicked and protested on her lap. “You must not tell Nonna where we have been,” Rosa would caution, holding up her finger; just as though Gian-Luca knew where they had been, or could have told Nonna if he had!
Sometimes Rosa would stay on and play with him a little in the room that had once been Olga’s, but more often he would be shut up there alone, and this, for some reason, he did not object to—he liked the room that had been Olga’s. There were bars in front of the window now, and a high nursery guard for the occasional fire, but beyond these two drawbacks the room was all his, his to do with as he listed. He could twist the large knobs on the washstand by the window, he could crawl away under the bed, he could climb along the charming slippery horsehair sofa or toboggan down the seat of the chair. He could stare in fascination at the deep wounds in the wall; one just above the bed and four just opposite. He longed to put his finger into these deep wounds, but found that they were too high up. In the region of the wounds the paper hung torn and jagged—it looked like mutilated skin; and Gian-Luca, all agog with primitive instinct, would ache and ache to tear it away.
“Gug!” said Gian-Luca, returning fiercely to his first form of self-expression, “Gug! Gug!” And his small hand would grasp the empty air in its eager will towards destruction. Except for those five wounds the walls were quite bare; Teresa had left them just as they had been on the night when Olga died. Only the Virgin, together with her bracket, and the Heart—whose bleeding no hand ever staunched—had gone, and in their place were the wounds that Gian-Luca longed to prod.
III
I
When he was four a splendid thing happened; Gian-Luca was given the freedom of the shop. It had been impossible to do other than accord it, short of tying up Gian-Luca’s legs, so Teresa threw open the door from the parlor and said: “Go—but do not steal the pickles.”
This occurred one morning in July, when the warmth of the sun was busily engaged in coaxing out endless smells. The street door was also standing wide open, and through it came a series of rumblings and shoutings that expressed the spirit of Old Compton Street.
The shop! All his life Gian-Luca remembered those first impressions of the shop; the size of it, the smell of it, the dim, mysterious gloom of it—a gloom from which strange objects would continually jump out and try to hit you in the face—but above all the smell, that wonderful smell that belongs to the Salumeria. The shop smelt of sawdust and cheeses and pickles and olives and sausages and garlic; the shop smelt of oil and cans and Chianti and a little of split peas and lentils; the shop smelt of coffee and sour brown bread and very faintly of
