and don’t want to.’
‘Eat something.’
‘I’ll vomit.’ She shakes her pale miserable head.
‘I know where he is,’ he says. He takes her away from the crowd of boys who have gathered round Fiorenzo with endless jokes about his warrior mother, and sits with her on a bench. ‘I’m going to go and get him.’
‘Never want to see him again.’ She’s vehement. ‘You were right. He did have another woman …’
There was once a time when, hearing this, he would have felt vindicated. Now he just feels terribly sad, and is about to tell her so when she doubles over and throws up all over his new camel-coloured mock-suede lace-ups.
‘Cristo! What the …!’
Though he doesn’t normally care too much about his possessions, he has only two pairs of shoes. This is the brand-new pair. Now their fashionably pointed toes have been ruined by a red mass of what looks like half-digested berries.
‘Mulberries,’ Teresa squeaks. ‘Breakfast …’
She looks so wretched he doesn’t know for whom to feel more sorry, her or him.
‘You’re sick, Teresa. I knew—’
‘You knew what?’ she shrieks.
Even wretched and with puke all over her mouth, she can still let loose with her famous temper.
‘What did you know, you scandalous boy?’ she screams. With a sudden wild-eyed lack of control, she begins waving her arms around. Is she going to hit him again?
Just then, Dottor Pacchioni’s wife comes by and gives him a stern look. As quickly as she has whipped herself into a frenzy, Teresa collapses in a small, sobbing, puke-smelling heap on the bench where he has taken her. He nervously pats the heaving little mound of misery.
‘Teresina cara, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She sits up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Well, now you do. I’m pregnant! I found out yesterday.’ Her eyes are abject. ‘I haven’t told anyone. I want to kill myself.’
He stares at her in stunned silence. ‘Porca miseria! Not even your mother?’
‘She’d kill me.’ She shudders. ‘Can we find water?’
Why, he wonders, has she chosen to tell him of all people? This is something he doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to think about her and Aguinaldo making a baby together.
Yet as they go in search of water, he hears himself saying, amazed at his calm self-assurance, ‘Don’t talk like that. There’s only one thing you can do. You have to tell Aguinaldo and he has to come home and marry you.’
‘Never!’ she barks.
‘You have no choice,’ he says firmly. ‘It’s what you have to do.’
She stops in her tracks and glares at him.
‘You crazy? You’re the one who thinks Aguinaldo isn’t good enough!’ She shakes her head like a sick bewildered puppy. ‘Anyway, what do you know about these things, Pistola? You’re just a kid. Madonna! Never even been in love! You don’t know the meaning of the word. Why am I even telling you about it? As if you could help …’
What can he say? Tell her he’s the one who should marry her? Tell her he has even planned his honeymoon with her and have her laugh at him? Staring into her beautiful face contorted with misery he knows, as surely as he has ever known anything, that there’s only one right course of action for her right now. To make her understand the rightness of it, he knows he has to tell her the sad little story of his own mother and father.
She listens wide-eyed. ‘She never let him know she was having a baby?’
‘Didn’t give him that chance.’
‘Why don’t you try to find him?’
His voice roughens with exasperation. ‘It’s all a mess. The sort of mess you can still avoid.’
‘But I thought you hated Aguinaldo?’
‘Zia Andromaca says he was really sad the night he left.’
‘No! Don’t want to see him ever again.’
‘Teresa, I don’t think you should do to that baby what my mother did to me …’
She stares at him. ‘Pistola, you’re crying …’
Overwhelmed with self-pity and helplessness, he tries to hide it, tries to sound convincing, attempts a smile.
‘Wouldn’t you have tears in your eyes if you had to go and tell your grumpy grandfather someone puked mulberries all over the new shoes he just bought you?’
‘I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you a new pair.’
If only, he thinks, it could be so easy to make up for your mistakes. To say, I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you a new life.
Instead, he says, ‘I know where Aguinaldo is. I’m going to go there and bring him back here, Teresa. Don’t try to stop me.’
When he finally gets home, who should be there having his third glass of vin santo with Nonno Mario but the man who has just saved his life, Zio Umberto?
The two of them are arguing loudly about an upcoming cycle race in Rome. His uncle is trying to persuade Nonno Mario to go with him to watch it. The discussion is so heated Zio Umberto has totally forgotten the part he played in the festa fracas, while much to Pistola’s relief Nonno Mario doesn’t even register the fact that his grandson’s new and once-camel-coloured suede lace-ups are now a lustrous mahogany, courtesy of the dye Pistola and Teresa bought at the merceria.
When Zio Umberto was twenty-three, far skinnier and with a handlebar moustache, he and his tandem partner, Pepe Santelmo, were cycling champions. A travesty Pistola has never been able to understand since Nonno Mario has always maintained Pepe consistently chose the back seat and let Zio Umberto do all the work.
That was a good few decades ago. Zio Umberto no longer rides tandem with Santelmo or anyone else. And handlebar moustaches are no longer the trend in Campino. But he has remained a dedicated fan of the sport, and if Nonno Mario will go with him on the train to Rome, he’ll pay for them both, including their stay with the priests in a seminary he knows in Trastevere.
Sadly, he’s not getting the enthusiastic response he expected.
‘I’m not as keen as you are on cycling, Umberto,’ says Nonno Mario, ‘and why else would I want to go to Rome? Saw it all when I was in the military. Colosseum. Forum. St
