Tuscan Rose (28 page)

‘I don’t think your son is interested in me,’ Rosa said diplomatically.

‘Bah!’ scoffed Nonno, shaking his head. ‘He’s still in love with that stupid
puttana?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You know, I worked like
a brute so that my son wouldn’t have to; worked until my back broke so he could be educated. Those Tamaris—do you know what they are? Cheesemakers who have gone up in the world! “Signor Parigi,” that
puttana’s
father told me, “I’ve got ambitions for my daughter.”
Testa di cazzo!
Does he think she shits gold and pisses silver? My son is better than her! Better than all of them! That Visconti he married her off to has money but he has no sense!’

The more Nonno recalled Signor Tamari’s rejection of his son, the more heated he became. Rosa tried to placate him. After about a quarter of an hour of listening to his woes about Antonio’s lack of marital status, Rosa managed to extricate herself by promising she would do something to woo him—which, of course, she had no intention of doing.

Out in the foyer, the maid, Ylenia, helped Rosa on with her coat. ‘I hope you managed today,’ she said. ‘He can be a handful. I’ve worked for him for nearly fifteen years. He turned my hair grey when I was still a young woman.’

Rosa smiled politely but her curiosity got the better of her. ‘Why does Nonno have all those cowboy items in his room?’

‘Oh, Nonno loves his cowboy films,’ said Ylenia, with a smile. ‘Before he became sick, he and Signor Parigi used to go the cinema to watch them.’

Rosa walked back to her apartment feeling worn out. Antonio obviously trusted her: his father was not somebody anyone could handle. She laughed out loud when she thought of Antonio and his father sitting in the cinema and watching westerns together. It was almost as funny as him secretly playing with Allegra. Antonio was full of surprises.

Roberto, the new member of the troupe, exasperated Rosa. For the first few rehearsals, she tried to engage him in conversation but grew tired of him looking over her head and answering her in monosyllables. She didn’t like the way he bossed Carlo about, correcting his pronunciation in the middle of a scene or criticising
his costume, or that he never helped with the menial tasks that needed to be done. One day Piero was rolling a cigarette when Roberto snatched it out of his hand and threw it away. ‘Don’t you know the tax they put on tobacco goes into building Mussolini’s army?’ he said. Piero clenched his jaw and looked as if he was about to punch Roberto, but thought better of it. Luciano smoothed things over when he saw them happen, but otherwise was oblivious to the tension Roberto created. Rosa wished Benedetto was coming on tour with them instead. Six weeks with Roberto was going to be unbearable.

‘Roberto snubs everyone except Luciano,’ Orietta told Rosa one evening when they were making pasta dough together. ‘He thinks the rest of us aren’t good enough for him.’

Rosa rolled her eyes. ‘What does he want?’ she asked, making a well in the flour and breaking the eggs into it. ‘I speak three foreign languages and you read more books than anybody else I know.’

‘Yes,’ said Orietta, passing a fork to Rosa to mix the dough, ‘but I don’t read in
Greek.’

Rosa laughed. ‘Isn’t he the son of a tram driver? I heard him boasting of his working-class origins to Luciano the other day.’

‘Well, he sees himself and Luciano as Renaissance men and the rest of us as peasants.’

Rosa shrugged. ‘He hasn’t even spoken to the rest of us to tell what we are.’

Orietta took over the kneading of the dough to give Rosa a rest. ‘Roberto has given me some violin pieces to play in the monologue he is doing tomorrow,’ she said. ‘But he won’t let me rehearse with him.’

‘What monologue?’ asked Rosa. She brushed the flour from her apron.

‘Some piece he’s insisted on doing before the play,’ Orietta told her. ‘Luciano had to agree because we can’t replace him this late in the season.’

To begin the tour, The Montagnani Company opened again at the theatre on Via del Parlascio. Before the play, Carlo, Donatella and Roberto were scheduled to perform a variety act each to warm up the crowd. Carlo’s juggling and Donatella’s routine with Dante were crowd-pleasers. Rosa was intrigued to know what Roberto had planned for his monologue. The audience of workers and shopkeepers would not stand for anything highbrow; they might even throw fruit. The idea of Roberto covered in rotten melons made Rosa smile. She was annoyed at him for having done nothing to help set up the theatre before the performance. Luciano was in the ticket office and didn’t see Roberto sitting on the stage steps, reading a book on Florentine art, while everyone else hurried about around him. When Donatella suggested that Roberto could help her set up the chairs, he gave her such a disdainful look that she burst into tears.

‘I don’t like him,’ she whispered to Rosa in the wings.

‘Neither does Dante,’ Rosa replied, pointing at the dog and trying not to laugh. He was piddling on one of Roberto’s costumes.

When it was time for Roberto to perform, he didn’t appear straightaway. The evening was warm and the audience was restless, clapping their hands and stamping their feet. Rosa glanced at Luciano who was standing with the lighting assistant. His shoulders were tensed. Rosa caught his eye and pointed to the piano, asking with her gestures if he wanted her to perform a piece to keep the audience entertained. But then there was a ripple of the curtains. The assistant turned on the spotlight. The curtain opened and Roberto was revealed, standing on the stage with his foot on a chair. He wore black pants and a black shirt with a sash across his chest. The audience fell silent. From the whimsical look on his face, Rosa anticipated Roberto was about to perform a comedy act and hoped he could pull it off. She glanced at Luciano. Was he thinking the same thing? Was that why he was looking so anxious?

Roberto turned and faced the audience. He spread his legs apart, thrust out his chest and tensed his jaw.

‘
Ho sempre ragione!’
he roared, waving his right hand as if he were holding a gun.
‘Credere! Obbedire! Combattere!’

Rosa couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The bulldog chin, the flashing eyes, the dramatic pauses were all Il Duce’s. Roberto had transformed himself into Mussolini.

‘I flew my plane, swam the Mediterranean, duelled with a villain, raced my Alfa Romeo and rode my stallion to be here,’ said Roberto.

He paused a moment to mime playing the violin. The music was filled in by Orietta who, on cue from Roberto, played a few bars of Paganini’s Caprice No 24, a notoriously difficult piece.

Most of the audience laughed but some of them shifted in their seats. It was standard propaganda for Mussolini to be photographed undertaking some activity: fencing, horseback riding, playing the violin, painting, skiing. He was always portrayed as valiant, fearless, heroic, cultured and masculine.

‘When I visited Sicily,’ Roberto continued in Mussolini’s character, ‘my presence stopped the flow of Mount Etna and saved hundreds of lives. Once I brought rain to a drought-ridden region. On another occasion I underwent an operation without chloroform, having trained my body to be above pain.’

Those in the audience who found Roberto’s satire amusing laughed louder.

‘Pressmen, if you want a photograph, then you must catch me on my
daily
walk,
daily
horse ride,
daily
car ride or
daily
swim. I read Dante every morning before playing my violin like a maestro.’

Orietta came in with the first movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto.

‘In my spare time I write novels, translate books, bed women and answer the letters of the thousands of citizens who write to me each year begging me to intervene in their personal problems. All this as well as being Italy’s leader and overseeing the ministries of Foreign Affairs, War and Navy and Aviation. I never sleep, and the light is always left on in my office to prove it.’

More hoots of laughter from the audience. Of course, twenty-four hours were too few for all of Mussolini’s purported daily activities. But it was dangerous to publicly make fun of the dictator.
What had possessed Luciano to allow Roberto to do it? His act put the troupe at risk of being arrested, Rosa thought angrily.

Piero played the accordion while Roberto sang a list of Mussolini’s aphorisms from the ridiculous to the threatening. ‘If you are fat, I have no pity for you: you are stealing from Italy with your greediness’; ‘It is my intention to transform Italians from a race of spaghetti-munching romantics into soldiers’; and ‘No-one has stopped us. No-one will stop us.’

The last statement was chilling because it was true. Roberto could laugh at Mussolini all he liked, Rosa thought, but the other politicians either sided with Mussolini or crumbled under the fascist violence.

Roberto ended his act by placing his foot on the chair again and leaning on his knee. ‘I am Alexander the Great and Caesar rolled into one. I am Socrates and Plato. Machiavelli, Napoleon and Garibaldi. I am Italy’s greatest hero. But…oh, how my jaw aches at night.’

The curtain dropped and the audience cheered. Rosa cast her eyes down, too frightened to look. Were they
all
cheering? She was barely able to perform the music for
The Count of Monte Cristo.
After the performance, she helped the others clean the theatre but the more she thought about Roberto’s act, the more her blood boiled. What was he doing? There were fascist spies everywhere looking for subversive activity. Rosa held in her anger despite Luciano’s constant glances at her. Had he known Roberto was going to satirise Mussolini?

The troupe walked back to the Montagnani family’s apartment. Carlo was tired and went to bed. Rosa tucked Sibilla in her cot by the stove before joining the others at the kitchen table. Orietta sliced some bread for supper. When Roberto congratulated himself on the success of his act, Rosa could not contain herself any longer.

‘How could you do that act,’ she asked, ‘knowing it could have us sent to prison?’

Roberto’s face pinched but he didn’t answer. Piero and Donatella sent Rosa looks of sympathy. Luciano shifted in his chair.

‘You don’t know who was in that audience,’ Rosa continued. ‘Just because they are workers doesn’t make them all anti-fascists. Some of them are
fattori
and estate managers. Some of them are working for the fascist elite.’

Roberto scoffed. ‘We need to do more than pass around little pamphlets in secret,’ he said. ‘Or spend our lives worrying about what sauce we put on our pasta.’

‘Enough!’ said Luciano, raising his hand to silence Roberto. ‘I won’t have you insulting Rosa. She understands what the fascists represent.’

Luciano turned to Rosa. ‘We can’t remain passive,’ he said. ‘Mussolini intends to march on Europe the same way he did on Rome. It will be a disaster for Italy. We are the artists of the city. We have to awaken public opinion. Make people aware of the propaganda they are being fed.’

An uneasy feeling stirred in Rosa’s stomach. So Luciano had known about Roberto’s monologue. She sensed a gulf opening up between herself and Luciano. She wanted to close it, but didn’t know how. She couldn’t remain silent when her child’s life was being put in danger. Roberto has done this, she thought. Luciano was satisfied with his small offensive against fascism until Roberto came along. Now he is taking more dangerous risks.

‘Do you know what the fascists are doing?’ Roberto asked Rosa, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Thousands of innocent Italians have been imprisoned without trial.’

Rosa’s skin prickled. The condescending expression on Roberto’s face infuriated her. ‘And do you have any idea what it is like to be sent to prison by the fascists?’ she retorted. ‘Well, I do! It’s not some marvellously heroic gesture, believe me!’

Roberto opened his mouth and then shut it again.

‘I have Sibilla’s welfare to consider,’ she told him. ‘If something happens to me she’ll be left an orphan. As petty and self-centred as that might sound to you, she’s my first responsibility. I’m not risking going back to prison.’

Sibilla started crying. The argument had woken her up. Rosa picked her daughter up and fled to Orietta’s bedroom. ‘Shh, don’t cry,’ she told Sibilla, sitting on the bed and cuddling her. Tears poured down Rosa’s own cheeks. Her heart ached. What was happening? She loved Luciano but this would drive them apart. Was fighting Mussolini more important to him than her and Sibilla?

‘Rosa?’

She looked up to see Luciano standing in the doorway. His face was drawn.

‘I’ve told Roberto he’ll have to drop his act,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It’s not fair to put you and the others in danger.’

Rosa pulled Sibilla closer to her. ‘What did he say?’

‘He’s not happy.’

‘What if he leaves? Who will play all those roles?’

Luciano shrugged. ‘We’ll work something out.’ He sat down next to Rosa and nestled his chin into her neck. ‘We’ll be more careful in the future, all right?’

‘All right,’ said Rosa.

Her heart was full of conflicting emotions: tenderness, sorrow, fear. She couldn’t help feeling that she was making Luciano sacrifice something that was important to him. Luciano drew her to his side and kissed her. But even as they embraced, Rosa felt something had changed between them.

When
The Count of Monte Cristo
finished its run in Florence, the troupe revisited the towns they had the previous season and also expanded their tour to Prato. They returned to the spa town of Montecatini Terme. One day when she was walking by the town hall, Rosa imagined how nice it would be to get married there and have a picnic with the troupe in the park afterwards. It saddened her to think that there were no wedding plans in the near future; the fascists were more entrenched in power than ever. No matter what Luciano said about being committed to her, she was not a woman married before God and that hurt her. She sometimes
fantasised about turning up at the Convent of Santo Spirito with a wedding ring on her finger and redeeming herself in Suor Maddalena’s eyes. Now it seemed her desire for a name and a family had been thwarted. But she had no choice: she loved Luciano and the fight against fascism was everything to him. He’d cease to be Luciano if he was any other way.