Tuscan Rose (17 page)

By the time the interview was granted Rosa was already seven months pregnant. A guard led her to the interview room and told her to sit down.

‘Signor Direttore is busy at the present,’ the guard told her, locking her into the room. ‘You may have to wait some time.’

Rosa sat down in a chair. Her back was hurting and she felt a tiny elbow sticking into her stomach. There was a window in the interview room and through the dirty glass she could see the blue
sky. The baby kicked. Rosa rubbed her belly. ‘I’ll get us out of here, little one,’ she whispered to it.

Despite her advanced pregnancy, Rosa felt well. She had been given a reason to help herself and she was determined that whatever it took she was going to do it. She’d plead her allegiance to Mussolini if that would get her out.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. Fifteen minutes had passed. She rubbed her belly again and stood up from the chair and stared out the window. The baby was pressing on her bladder but she would have to bear it. She remembered the day that the Marchese had come to the convent and asked her to play the flute. Her bladder had caused her discomfort then. But that was a lifetime ago. She wished that she had played badly for him, she wished she had wet her pants, she wished anything that day had gone wrong and he had not chosen her. But the past is what it is, Rosa thought. I can’t change it. I must move on. She glanced back to the clock. She had been waiting forty-five minutes.

The prison director strode in the door. Rosa stood to attention, in accordance with the prison rule. It was the first time she had ever met with the man. He was buck-toothed and weedy and the buttons on his uniform were undone. Yet this slovenly official held her fate in his hands. She had rehearsed this moment many times. She would not smile but she would not be sullen either. She would be suitably serious; contrite. She would not beg. She would simply put herself in the director’s—and God’s—hands.

‘I see that you have made a productive effort in the workroom,’ the director said, glancing at a file on the desk.

‘Yes, Signor Direttore,’ Rosa answered. ‘I am saving up to support my child.’

The director glanced at Rosa’s stomach and nodded before looking back to his file. ‘Yes, quite,’ he said. ‘Well, I see the Madre Superiora’s statement on your rehabilitation. I have to submit it to the Ministry of Justice. Then we will see what happens.’

The director sounded positive but Rosa was not out of danger yet. Her heart pounded in her chest so fiercely she was sure that he would hear it. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Sibilla,’ Rosa asked her friend when they were in the exercise yard again, ‘you said that you were arrested for protesting against women teachers being paid less than men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do they pay women less than men?’

Rosa was too heavily pregnant to keep up the charade of waddling up and down the yard. She stood on the spot while Sibilla walked past her.

‘Well, the male teachers want to protect their jobs,’ Sibilla explained. ‘They argue that women need less and they aren’t as productive. But that’s just lies. The women I worked with could run circles around the men.’

‘Why do you think they are paid less?’

Sibilla sighed. ‘Because women don’t have the right to vote and they don’t have organised unions to protect them. Many of them still consider themselves appendages to their husbands with no right to work and support themselves.’

Rosa adjusted her stance so the baby would sit more comfortably and thought about what Sibilla had said. She imagined what it would be like to have a husband who earned money and took care of her. She pictured a nice home and food on the table. She’d forgo the right to work and vote if she could have something as simple as that for herself and the baby. Tears filled Rosa’s eyes because she knew that was not going to happen. No man would want her. It was going to be a struggle, especially if women were paid less than men for the same work. She realised how different she and Sibilla were from each other. Sibilla had once had a choice whether to work or not. Rosa never had.

‘I don’t need less,’ Rosa said, cradling her stomach. ‘I need more.’
When Rosa was in her eighth month of pregnancy, she found it difficult to sleep. Her dreams were full of sinister omens. She would see herself back at the Villa Scarfiotti, heavily pregnant and running through the woods with an unseen presence chasing her. She woke up bathed in sweat. One night, she tossed and turned until she finally found a comfortable position on the bunk and fell into a stupor. In her nightmares she heard voices: Sibilla; a guard; footsteps. Something was wrong. She tried to wake up but couldn’t. Her eyelids were like lead.

When she was taken to the exercise yard the following day, Sibilla wasn’t there. A male guard was on duty and Rosa couldn’t ask him where Sibilla was. They’ve separated us, she thought, regretting that she’d spoken so openly with Sibilla the last time they were together. They are still torturing me. I haven’t heard back about my release and now they’ve taken my only friend from me.

Rosa sat on the bench. Her ankles were too swollen to continue walking. She saw Suor Gabriella approach the guard and say something. He let her into the exercise yard. Something was wrong. Was Sibilla sick?

‘Here,’ Suor Gabriella said, giving Rosa a slip of paper. ‘She wanted me to give this to you.’

‘Sibilla?’ A thought occurred to Rosa: maybe Sibilla had been released!

Dear Rosa,

How I longed that I should live to see your child born. I was sure that the baby would be exactly like its mother and no less beautiful. Tell your child about me and teach it to love Italy and be strong. The solace you have brought me these last few months is the greatest treasure I have ever received. Goodnight, my sweet friend.

Sibilla

A chill trembled down Rosa’s spine. Her heart beat faster. ‘What does this mean?’ she asked Suor Gabriella.

The nun averted her eyes. ‘She was a leading member of Giustizia e Libertà, a personal enemy of Il Duce. Her husband was involved in a plot to assassinate him.’

Rosa clutched the note, still not comprehending. ‘Sibilla was a teacher. She was arrested for standing up for women’s rights.’

Suor Gabriella sighed. She had circles under her eyes and the lacklustre air of someone who hadn’t slept properly. ‘She was a condemned prisoner. An enemy of the state.’

‘A condemned prisoner?’ repeated Rosa, swallowing. She remembered what Osvaldo had said about political prisoners usually being sent to Trani or Ponza. ‘Did they move her to another prison?’

The pained expression on Suor Gabriella’s face sent Rosa’s thoughts into disarray. ‘What?’ she asked, almost shrieking. ‘What’s happened?’

Rosa’s distress caught the guard’s attention but Suor Gabriella dismissed him with a wave of her hand. ‘Sibilla Ciruzzi’s final appeal was denied yesterday,’ she told Rosa. ‘She was taken outside Florence last night and shot.’

Rosa’s shoulders crumpled and she felt nauseous. She recalled Sibilla’s words:
I’ve learnt that if the soul is immortal, then one never has to fear death;
and understood that her friend had known that she was condemned.

‘Sibilla!’ Rosa cried, clutching her hands to her chest as if she could close the gaping hole that was opening in her heart. ‘Sibilla!’ Her despair echoed throughout the prison.

‘Why?’ she asked Suor Gabriella through her tears. ‘Why? She’s been here for two years. Couldn’t they just let her be?’

But the nun was unable to say anything to comfort her. Rosa understood why. The only answer was one that was forbidden to be spoken. As long as Italy was in the clutches of a madman, there would be no justice.

O
ne morning in early May, Rosa woke with a cramping pain in her pelvis and thighs. The bed was damp. Her first thought was of the baby. She threw off the blanket, terrified she might be haemorrhaging like Maria. But there was no blood. She climbed out of bed and moved about but the ache in her abdomen remained. She sat down on her bunk and the pain subsided. It’s a false alarm, she thought. It’s only night sweats.

Suor Chiara arrived with Rosa’s breakfast. She was hungry and tried to eat the bread but it made her retch.

‘Are you all right?’ Suor Chiara asked her.

Rosa was about to tell her she was fine when her abdomen tightened and she had to grip the bunk for pain. ‘The baby is coming,’ she said.

‘I’ll fetch the nurse,’ Suor Chiara told her.

Rosa walked up and down the cell. The pain subsided as quickly as it had come. It was another hour before the nurse arrived with Suor Gabriella and by then the pain was worse. No matter how Rosa stood, sat or crouched she was uncomfortable.

‘Do you have birth pangs?’ the nurse asked her.

Rosa nodded. She assumed that was what the pains were. It felt like someone had tied a rope around her insides and was pulling it tight.

‘You’d better take her to the infirmary,’ Suor Gabriella told the nurse.

‘She’s not having the baby here,’ replied the nurse. ‘I’ve got my hands full with a prisoner with diphtheria. She’s going to Santa Caterina. I’ve got permission from Signor Direttore.’

Another contraction seized Rosa, this one much stronger than the others. She doubled over. The nurse told her that the pains would be mild at first and spaced apart, but the pain Rosa was feeling was not mild. Each contraction sent spasms around her body. She felt nauseous.

‘Come on then,’ the nurse said. ‘We’d better get you to the hospital while there is still time.’

‘You’re not going to make her walk there?’ said Suor Gabriella, her eyebrows rising in horror.

‘It’s only a few streets away,’ the nurse replied. ‘We’re not getting an ambulance.’

‘Nurse, this girl is not walking,’ said Suor Gabriella, her fists clenched in frustration. ‘I will get a stretcher.’ She strode to the cell door and called for assistance.

A contraction racked Rosa’s body. Beads of sweat pricked her face. A few moments later two guards arrived with a stretcher. Suor Gabriella helped Rosa onto it and placed her hand on her shoulder. ‘It will be easier after the first one.’

Rosa did her best to smile. Despite her discomfort, she appreciated Suor Gabriella’s consideration. Apart from Sibilla, she was the only person who had been kind to her in prison.

The guards carried Rosa down the corridor. The prisoners in the dormitory came to the door to see what was going on. Most of them gawked but a few called out ‘good luck’ to Rosa when they realised she was in labour.

When the guards reached the yard, the director was waiting there. ‘I’ve just received this morning the letter from the Ministry
of Justice. You were due to be released today,’ he told Rosa, placing a bundle wrapped in a handkerchief in her hand. ‘But I will send someone to the hospital to complete the paperwork later.’

The director’s words barely registered with Rosa. She looked at the bundle he had given her. Her chain was tucked inside the handkerchief. She clutched it to her chest. The silver key was in her possession again. It’s a good omen, she thought, remembering that it had been given to her to protect her from danger.

‘God bless you,’ said Suor Gabriella before the guards passed through the gates.

Rosa felt the sun on her face. It was a beautiful spring day. The air was fresh with the smell of jasmine and roses. She placed her hand on her belly as another pain seized her. ‘It’s all right, little one,’ she whispered to her unborn child. ‘We will see this through together.’

The Santa Caterina was a charitable lying-in hospital for unwed mothers. Rosa shut her eyes to the stares of shopkeepers and the people on the street. A priest made a point of glaring at her then looking away. Her condition and the direction she was being taken brought sneers to the onlookers’ faces and one surly blacksmith whistled a catcall. But Rosa shut the taunts out of her mind. Nothing was going to spoil this special day. People could look down on her if they wanted to but she would never allow them to look down on her child.

The guards carried her into the admissions area of the hospital. The building was cool and quiet. A nurse in a white uniform with black stockings and shoes stood up when the guards came inside.

‘Will you being staying?’ she asked them.

‘There’s no need,’ said the guard holding the stretcher near Rosa’s feet. ‘She was due to be released today and she’s not dangerous.’

The nurse nodded and called to an orderly to bring a trolley. The guards and the orderly helped Rosa move from the stretcher onto it. She was wheeled down a corridor and through a set of swing doors. Compared to the calm of the admissions area, the
corridor was a cacophony of wails, moans and screams. Rosa’s own pains were stronger than before. She gritted her teeth until the current contraction passed. The orderly left her outside a room on the trolley. Rosa could hear a woman screaming as if her legs were being cut off. She clenched her fists and did her best to quell her fears. Women died in childbirth, she knew that, but nothing must stop her from delivering her child safely.

Despite the pains and the noise, Rosa drifted off into a restless sleep. She was woken some time later by an orderly pushing the trolley into the room. A matron and a nurse were waiting for her there. All she could see from where she lay were a washbasin and a medicine cupboard stacked with cotton swabs, thermometers, throat sticks, gloves and bottles. The air was tinged with the smell of antiseptic.

‘Can you get onto the bench yourself?’ the matron asked her. ‘I don’t want to risk you falling.’

The matron took Rosa’s arm to support her while the nurse helped her slide off the trolley. Rosa felt dizzy and nearly fainted but the women had a strong grip on her. She thought how cool their flesh felt compared with hers. She was burning.

The nurse put down a stool and Rosa climbed onto it then onto the bench. When she lay down an excruciating pain pinched her back. She tried to relieve it by lying on her side but the nurses turned her on her back again and strapped her legs. The pain was stronger than ever now. Rosa felt an urge to bear down but the elevated position of her legs made it awkward. She wailed from the pain.

‘You still have a while to go,’ the matron told her. ‘Try to stay calm.’

Rosa stared at the ceiling. Things were starting to blur. She could barely hear what the matron was telling her through the haze of pain. The nurse took her temperature and listened to her heartbeat. Some time passed. Rosa was aware that the light through the curtains had changed. There was a patter of rain. It must already be late afternoon. She heard water being poured into a basin. The nurse washed her between the legs with Lysol. A few
months ago, she would have been mortified to have her private parts handled by another person. But the pain had put her beyond that. All she cared about was bringing her baby into the world. She thought of another woman seventeen years ago. It would have been winter and cold. It might have happened at home or in a hospital, but Rosa’s mother had gone through these same things to bring her into the world.

A contraction seized Rosa’s womb, much longer and stronger than the previous ones. She cried out and gripped the bench.

‘Shh! Shh!’ the matron told her. ‘Be brave. You’re young. This should be easy for you.’

‘What have you got in your hand?’ asked the nurse.

‘My cross,’ Rosa moaned.

‘Here,’ said the nurse, prising the chain from Rosa’s hand. ‘I will put it around your neck. If you hold it in your hand you might squeeze it when the baby comes and hurt yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rosa.

Sibilla had warned her that the birth would be painful, but Rosa could never have imagined such violent, torturing pains. Was the nurse telling her it was going to get worse? Another long contraction seized her, followed by waves of them. Rosa tried to sit up but the nurse pushed her back down.

‘We need to see the baby’s head,’ she told her.

Tears poured down Rosa’s face and mixed with her sweat. There was such pressure in her back she thought her spine might break. A fire seared her pelvis.

‘Push!’ said the matron. ‘Push!’

Rosa gripped the sides of the bench and pushed with all her strength. There was a burning between her legs. Then pain so terrible she screamed.

‘The baby is crowning,’ said the matron. ‘You’re lucky. This birth is moving quickly.’

Rosa bit her lip till it bled. She could not imagine enduring the agony for much longer. She cried out, sure she was being split in two. Then suddenly something moved.

‘One more push,’ the matron said, holding out a blanket to the nurse.

Rosa gritted her teeth and pushed. Something gushed out of her. The relief from the agony was so sudden that she jolted with the shock.

‘Good,’ said the nurse. ‘Are you all right?’

Rosa couldn’t answer her. She was trying to catch her breath. The nurse wrapped the baby in the blanket. It’s supposed to cry, isn’t it? thought Rosa, her heart racing. There was no sound; only a terrible silence. She attempted to sit up. She wanted to see what was going on with the baby. But she was too feeble.

‘Lie back, lie back,’ the nurse told her. ‘You still have to deliver the afterbirth.’

‘My baby…the baby,’ Rosa struggled to say. A horrible feeling stirred in her. The baby was dead. It was a cruel joke on God’s part to give her this hope. She started to weep.

Suddenly a cry broke the air.

‘It’s a girl,’ said the matron, holding up the pink-faced infant for Rosa to see. ‘A nice healthy girl.’

Rosa was filled with wonder at her baby daughter. The day after she was born, Rosa’s breasts flowed with milk. The child took to the nipple without difficulty. Rosa gazed in amazement at her daughter’s face. It was not like a newborn baby’s but slender with well-defined eyes and a rosebud mouth. Where had she inherited such beauty, Rosa wondered. In comparison to Signora Corvetto and the Baroness Derveaux, she knew herself to be only pretty in an ordinary way and certainly, to her relief, the child had nothing of Osvaldo in her. She played with the baby’s fingers and toes, and whenever she finished feeding, it was only a short while before her breasts began to ache with longing for the child to be with her again. Her milk was so plentiful that the ward nurse asked if she would feed some of the other babies whose mothers were too weak after the delivery to feed them or whose milk hadn’t come in yet. Rosa nursed two other babies, washing her breasts with
disinfectant and hot water between feeds. Despite the multiple feedings, her breasts overflowed. The nurses had to give her three changes of nightshifts and place a wad of muslin on her chest when she slept. Rosa didn’t mind. She would have nursed all the children in the hospital if they needed it, she enjoyed nurturing them so much. But with her own child it was special: she had brought her into life from her womb.

Giving birth had changed the way she viewed herself, Rosa realised. She reflected on her years at the convent and saw how tragic it was that the nuns were made to feel ashamed of their physical functions. A woman’s body and all its processes was a miracle. It was a force of nature; not something to be shamefully hidden from oneself under a chemise. Although her organs were still tender, she felt the strength of them. Sibilla had said the fascists tried to control women by controlling their bodies. Perhaps, Rosa mused, society also tried to control women by making them feel there was something wrong with them. She smiled when she realised that she was starting to think like Sibilla.
Tell your child about me and teach it to love Italy and be strong.
She gazed down at the sleeping babe in her arms and knew exactly what she would call her.

In the ward where Rosa convalesced, there were eleven other women. Five days after the birth, only a few still had their babies with them. Rosa wondered had happened to the other infants. Of the women without babies, four looked depressed, two seemed relieved and one of them wept day and night. The woman in the bed next to Rosa wasn’t an unwed mother; she was a poor factory worker whose midwife had recommended that she deliver her next baby in hospital because of complications with her last pregnancy. She was missing her front upper and lower teeth. ‘One for each child,’ she told Rosa, cheerfully sticking her fingers into the gap in her mouth.

Although the nurses were kind, there was a sense that the unmarried mothers were in disgrace. Rosa had overheard the ward sister try to comfort the crying woman by saying, ‘You have
redeemed yourself by putting your baby in the arms of a couple wed before God.’

Rosa held little Sibilla and fought back her tears. She remembered the harsh looks she had received on the street when she was in labour and on her way to the hospital. ‘Never,’ she whispered into her daughter’s ear. ‘I will never give you up.’ After that, Rosa dreaded it when Sibilla was taken to the hospital nursery after her feedings. She was afraid that she would never see her again.

A week after the birth, Rosa started to feel restless. She had spent so long between four walls she wanted to be out in the world. She knew she faced challenges but hiding away in a hospital wasn’t going to stop them coming. The prison director had promised to send someone with her release documents so she could be discharged. Rosa planned to find a room to live in and some work she could do while taking care of Sibilla. She asked the ward sister when she might be able to leave. The sister promised she would speak to the hospital administrator.

The following day, a woman in a tailored dress with puffed sleeves came to see Rosa. She was short, and her navy blue hat with a cluster of daisies on it did little to distract from her heavy jowls. She drew the curtains around the bed although that wouldn’t stop the others from overhearing the conversation. Sibilla had been brought from the nursery for her midday feeding but was still asleep in the basket by Rosa’s bed. The woman gazed at Sibilla for a moment then introduced herself as Signora Cherubini, the head of the charity board that ran the hospital. She had Sibilla’s registration of birth papers in her hand.