dinner that night, Aldo being away, they asked Susanna, cautiously, the question about conversion. Tom asked. He had told himself to be bold in Italian, or get nowhere, but so many delicate matters crumble under a badly chosen word. ‘I mean to say,’ he said, ‘you’re not religious. Nor is Aldo. So why didn’t people just, you know, stop being religious before? If it would help them?’
Susanna stood to start clearing the plates, which for a moment the children took as a sign that they were not going to get an answer. But Susanna was thinking.
‘The modern world is very different,’ she said, after a moment or two, clattering a little. ‘Our ancestors, in the old Italy, had nothing other than religion. Nobody would have let them escape their religion. Nowadays, we have united Italy to believe in. Not everybody makes the same choice, but now we have a choice.’
That didn’t seem to make any sense either. If the Christians were so keen for Jews to convert, how could they not let them escape their religion? Surely they wanted them to escape their religion?
‘Riley says it’s the same God anyway,’ said Tom. ‘Jew or Christian. Or Muslim! It’s all offshoots from the Jewish god, and people have given him different names.’
That night they decided that the best way for Tom and Kitty to become Italian and Jewish was if they all became blood brothers, which had the added advantage that it would make Nenna English as well. It was particularly important because they saw so little of each other. After bedtime, a small knife was procured from the kitchen, jabs were made in fingertips, and fingertips were pressed together in a rather bloody mess, for probably longer than necessary. The squeaks of excitement at this mass martyrdom alerted Vittorio and Stefano, who bounced in and, once they realised what was going on, insisted that they too should be blooded. Vittorio made a huge fuss about it, and then let Kitty swaddle his finger in a grubby handkerchief.
Kitty fell asleep clutching her sore finger, tightly. She was happy.
This was the first year they went to the lake. After Rome, the lake was a vision of a different paradise, like something just beyond a wall, glimpsed through an arch in a Renaissance painting, tiny in the distance through the just-discovered law of perspective. It was a place one could become thirsty for, Tom felt, as he approached it for the first time: the hills behind him, black with forest; the green irrigated meadow beneath his feet, rolling down to the shores; and the great blue limpid eye of the lake itself, dozing in the sun, relaxing in the arms of its tree-robed promontories. Look at it! Flat, cool, reflective, a surface like blue slate. Over to one side, a handful of chestnut horses stood in the water, long-legged sentinels of the little harbour. They raised their heads at his appearance, up to their ankles in their own perfect reflections. A very strange effect.
Everyone walked down together.
‘Show us the other beach, and the stream,’ Nadine was saying to Aldo, but Tom had already pulled off his shirt and kicked off his shoes and was running out through the shallow sweet water to dive into the perfect surface, and revel. About twenty feet out, the sloping muddy-sandy lake-bed dropped off beneath him, suddenly, into deeper, colder water. Tectonic plates! he thought. Marine cliff-faces. Here be monsters. The drop-off was marked by a swathe of tall narrow tubular reeds, growing like an inner halo all around the lake. (Later he knew them well. You could break them off and use the pointed ends to pick your teeth. They’d draw blood on your gums if you weren’t careful. If you broke them open the inside was a strange almost-solid white foam.) Then just beyond the reed-bed was a bed of weeds: to go out into the lake proper, to dive and frolic in deep water beyond this little safe shallow harbour, you had to swim through those weeds. Their long subaqueous strands bore leaves like the glass leaves on Venetian necklaces, and jewel-coloured dragonflies were alighting on their tiny tufts, which just pierced the surface, as if for that very purpose. Below, the misty slime-clad stalks gradually became invisible, disappearing down into the cold depths. They trailed against Tom’s legs like something which might grab his ankle and pull him down. Tom swam through fast, front crawl, legs kicking mightily. The water was superb; an unspeakable joy.
He came out shaking parabolas of iridescent water drops off into the sunlight, and lay himself down. Can’t I be a lizard, and lie in the heat, on the black sand, immobile? I shall soak in all the sun till the sun is all used up; I shall radiate, I shall never ever move. Above him, twinkling poplar leaves, tiny blades against the bluest sky. Around him, a very low buzz, the quietest hottest most silent sound: one insect, perhaps, dozing off. Beneath him, a thin worn towel and the heat of the black sand coming through it. To one side: the lividly green field, riven with swampy irrigation channels, and spangled in the mornings with bright blue chicory flowers which, he would learn, at the stroke of noon folded their stringy petals in and disappeared till the next day. And just there, inches from his pale toes, the round and lovely lake. No wind yet – that, he would learn, came later, after the chicory had retired. No movement, no ripple. A slight smell of what Nenna called mentuccia – mentoooooooo-cha. How she mocked his accent. How he mocked hers. Late morning. Summer. Bliss. Swallows and swifts dipping and softly cheeping, way overhead. When he asked the name of anything, he got a shrug and a word meaning something like ‘fat face’ or ‘Chatterbox’, or else ‘you can’t translate it’. He looked things up in the Latin dictionary, in case there was a connection, like lacerta and lucertola: lizard. Rondine, rondone, rondicchio: swallow, swift, martin. He kept sketchbooks, and wrote everything down: sizes and colours, where he’d seen it, what time of day, what it was doing. His little drawings were not only accurate, they were charming.
Nadine and Kitty came wandering back. They had seen a massive tree stump, semi-submerged, which looked like a horse’s head. You could see the castle of Bracciano from just round there, and there was a rock you could sit on, out in the water. Kitty and Nenna had swum out to it; they looked such mermaids with their hair.
And now they could hear Susanna calling them to lunch; her voice faint down two fields and across the little road. Tom’s greed woke his hunger, and he rolled over. He could see Nenna, out in the water. She had made a coronet out of the emerald weeds and was putting it on her father’s head: he emerged from the water like a Triton, hairy chested and dripping, Nenna a naiad beside him, laughing. They shook themselves, water flying off their thick curly hair, and pulled on their sandals to set off up the field. Tom dragged himself off the towel and followed them, muttering under his breath the names of all the delicious pastas which Susanna might have made: in bianco, con ragù, carbonara, all’amatriciana, all’arrabbiata, l’aglio e olio, alla puttanesca …
They walked on up.
‘Come on, perfidious Albion!’ Aldo called back to him. Tom took off at a run, and overtook them at the gate, vaulting it: hands to rung two on the near side and rung one on the far, body horizontal, fly over – yes! He landed skidding on chamomile. The dusty scent of it erupted at his feet, and Nenna smiled. He walked up the hot white-dust road to the shade under the umbrella pines and the pale gigantic eucalyptus.
Nadine wrote to Riley.
Bracciano
August 1929
Dearest,
The children are just in heaven, I think. This is an entirely new heaven. Nenna told us that Romans don’t like lakes, traditionally – because the Etruscans live there, so it’s all left over from Lars Porsena of Clusium swearing by the nine gods and so forth … but Aldo finds the seaside too busy, and has enough of it trying to drain it at work. This place is a kind of agricultural ruin, part of a farm belonging
