The Lost Father Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Marina Warner

  Map

  Principal Characters

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One: Rosa

  Chapter 1: The Snail Hunt 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8: The Snail Hunt 2

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12: The Snail Hunt 3

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15: The Snail Hunt 4

  Chapter 16

  Part Two: Fantina

  Chapter 17: The American Girls

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19: The Education of Fantina

  Chapter 20: The Queen of Sheba 1

  Chapter 21: The Queen of Sheba 2

  Part Three: Anna

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Like Visconti’s film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism.

  According to family legend, Davide Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother’s background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York – where they find only humiliation and poverty – and after their return to Italy in the early 1920’s. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

  About the Author

  Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic. Her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), the collection of stories, Mermaids in the Basement and most recently The Leto Bundle. Her historical quests into areas of myth and symbolism – Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens, and No go the Bogeyman – led her into the exploration of fairy tales. She is the editor of Wonder Tales, a collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries and the author of a study of the fairy tale, From the Beast to the Blonde. In 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.

  ALSO BY MARINA WARNER

  Fiction

  The Leto Bundle

  In a Dark Wood

  A Skating Party

  The Lost Father

  Indigo

  The Mermaids in the Basement

  Wonder Tales (editor)

  Non-Fiction

  The Dragon Empress:

  Life and Times of Tz’u-his 1835–1908

  Empress Dowager of China

  Alone of All Her Sex:

  The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

  Joan of Arc:

  The Image of Female Heroism

  Monuments and Maidens:

  The Allegory of the Female Form

  Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time

  (The Reith Lectures 1994)

  From the Beast to the Blonde:

  On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

  No Go the Bogeyman:

  Scaring, lulling and Making Mock

  PRINCIPAL

  CHARACTERS

  Nunzia and Luigi Pittagora

  Their children:

  Davide (b.1893)

  Rosalba (b.1897) and Caterina (b.1899)

  Franco (b.1900)

  Tommaso Talvi (b.1891), Davide’s schoolfriend

  Maria Filippa (b.1894), marries Davide, 1912

  Papà Sandro, marries Caterina, New York, 1915

  Children of Maria Filippa and Davide:

  Pericle (b.1913)

  Immacolata (b.1915)

  Talia (b.1917)

  Lucia (b.1919)

  Fantina (b.1922)

  Anna (b.1950), Fantina’s daughter, the narrator

  Nicholas (b.1976), son of Anna, grandson of Fantina.

  For my mother and her sisters, the Terzulli daughters.

  Marina Warner

  THE LOST FATHER

  Faithful mother tongue

  I have been serving you.

  Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colours

  so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch

  as preserved in my memory.

  This lasted many years.

  You were my native land; I lacked any other.

  I believed that you would also be a messenger

  between me and some good people

  even if they were few, twenty, ten

  or not born, as yet …

  Faithful mother tongue,

  perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.

  So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colours

  bright and pure if possible,

  for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.

  CZESLAW MILOSZ

  PART ONE

  ROSA

  When I was born I saw men as in a state of grace. Later, when I learned otherwise, their fall opened a wound in me – a wound that has become a door …

  LEONORA CARRINGTON

  1

  The Snail Hunt 1

  LONDON, 1985

  ‘“LIKE THE NEEDLE her mother would burnish in a candle flame before probing for a splinter under her skin, memories of those days pierced her with sudden clarity: a sister’s footfall on the scoured stairs, the nursery smell of clothes boiling in the copper cauldron on the stove, the angle of another sister’s head, intent on the pattern she was cutting on the table. For long stretches she preferred to live in deliberate forgetfulness.

  “But sometimes, she couldn’t stop the memories coming. In the same way as she’d sometimes want an ice cream even though she knew her teeth would feel skinned alive, she’d lift the blinds and look into the sunlight of those days, and then, above all, she’d see her father, and he was shaving.”’

  I paused. Your head remained cocked so that you could see through your bifocals the button you were sewing.

  ‘What do you think so far?’ I asked. I tapped the pages of the manuscript together on my lap.

  You said, thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t say deliberate forgetfulness.’ I could hear a catch in your voice, under the vibrating r’s, the echo of your first language. ‘I don’t want to forget. It’s just happened like that. After I married your father and we came to live here.’ You glanced around, at the walnut kneehole desk, the Welsh carvers in the window embrasure, the decanters of pale amber sherry in a Tantalus on the sideboard behind the television set.

  ‘But what do you think?’ I asked again. ‘Is my Fantina you? Does she make sense to you?’

  You laughed, lightly, and nipped the thread neatly with your teeth, making sure not to get lipstick on the blouse. ‘I like the bit about ice cream,’ you went on, looking up at me for a moment. ‘You know, we used to have hot ices too, believe it or not. Straight from the oven.’

  ‘Baked Alaska!’

  ‘They weren’t called that.’ You pressed the cloth around the shank of the button smooth and swung the blouse onto the arm of the chair. ‘I can’t remember what the gelateria called them. They were expensive – in fact I think I only had one, once.’ Your sma
ll neat head, bent over the sewing basket, was still dark-haired, soft in texture and close-set like plumage. You found the spool you needed and reached into the tidy heap of mending to fetch out another garment in need of repair. ‘My father used to wait until the end of the festa to buy up the leftovers. He’d wake us up – in the middle of the night, for heavensake’s – and we’d sit up in bed and eat ice cream.’

  ‘I’ll put that in,’ I said, opening my current scarlet and black Flying Eagle notebook, the sixth since I started putting together an imaginary memoir of my southern Italian mother. ‘What’s a good name for Baked Alaska Ninfania-style? How about a Theda Bara? Was she around then? … No, I know, a Pola Negri!’

  You laughed again, and I went on reading to you. I’d filled two notebooks with a draft of the early part, The Duel, and I was trying to weave that story together with other memories of your childhood, of the Mussolini years and your father’s last day – when you were eight years old and you’d been out with your sisters gathering snails after a shower. Usually, I’d bring over my own eight-year-old, Nicholas, on a Sunday afternoon to see his Grandma, but on this occasion, Nicholas was at the zoo with his father to visit the repellent insect he has adopted. For ten pounds a year, he can help save the species.

  I began again: ‘“It was May, the morning splashed” – no, maybe “spattered” is the better word here – “blue and green light about the courtyard, for the sun had not yet reached the crucible heat of summer. Henbane and eyebright were springing in the crevices of the walls, and on the ground, grass tufts gleamed, still glossy before the dust came; the wisteria branched up the southern wall, its twisting, hempen stems loaded with butterfly-winged racemes of pale lavender flushing to purple, like rich old opera-goers at the Politeama in Riba, displaying their finery on withered limbs.”’

  ‘In spring, the scent was quite wonderful,’ you said, almost to yourself. ‘But I don’t know about those opera-goers. I don’t think people had any “finery”, not in Riba.’

  ‘I’ll cut it. I wasn’t sure about it as an image anyway. Listen, though, I’ve got the wisteria scent in.’ I went on, ‘“It was a magnificent symptom of nature’s unnecessary lavishness, thought the father, as he fluffed the bole of his shaving brush in the soap –”’

  ‘He used a cut-throat, don’t forget.’

  ‘I’m coming to it. Wait. “– the wisteria would need only a hundredth, a thousandth of the perfume it expended to attract enough bees to cross-fertilise the whole of the province …”’

  ‘For heavensake’s, it’s nearly five o’clock. Time for a cup of tea, I think.’ You got up and left me to go into the kitchen. ‘I don’t know when you find time to write, darling.’

  ‘No one else is there to notice. I told you. I’m the last person left in Ephemera; and they’re looking for funds to maintain the department. I expect I’ll be axed.’

  ‘That man I met, the one you work for, he was telling me they couldn’t do without you.’ My mother was calling out above the start-up chirring of the electric kettle. ‘I’m sure they think the world of you.’

  ‘Mark would say that, and he might even mean it. But he’s powerless, before Cuts – “Cuts, the great monster of Slime Stronghold! Only Zapquoid can prevail against him!” And where is Zapquoid when you need him? In another game altogether.’

  ‘There you go again, darling,’ said my mother, pouring boiling water into a fine china tea pot. ‘Running yourself down, again. Kissing the devil at night.’

  ‘Meeting the devil with mourning,’ I muttered. Aloud, I said, ‘Not true. I’m fighting back. I’ve even written a letter to the head of Fun Inc., asking if his firm would be interested … seeing as so much of the collection in this the finest museum of Social History in the world emanates from the varied enterprises of Fun City. Do you know, he wrote back, asking me to send someone in my department to talk about possible sponsorship.’

  ‘So,’ said my mother, ‘I could take a holiday in California at the same time.’

  I looked at you. You can spring with such decisiveness, it’s alarming.

  ‘Nicholas would find Fun City splendid; I’d take him there while you did your work, went to twist that fellow’s arm or whatever,’ she added, pouring out the china tea into gold-rimmed porcelain tea cups and saucers and adjusting the small silver spoons. I might be imagining it, but I think she has become even more anglicised since my father died; it might be her way of commemorating him. ‘I could pay a visit to my sisters in Parnassus. And what’s more to the point, you could talk to them, too. About my father. About those days. They’ll remember more; they’re older, they were there when it all happened.

  ‘I was too young.’

  You switched on the television to hear the news. It wouldn’t be on for another three quarters of an hour, but you wanted to be sure not to miss it. I drank my tea, as the woolly light of a winter London wrapped the house in its grey muffler. You were saying, ‘There’s room for us all, at Lucia’s. She’s got a big house. There might even be some mementoes, photo albums, whatnot for you.’ You paused, then warned, ‘My sisters aren’t sentimental. They’ve turned their backs on the past. Not like us, here in England. Your father kept everything …’ You gestured towards the overflowing desk which had been his and the cupboards all around in his study, where you now write your letters and do your bills. ‘Full. Full of odds and ends, old stiffies and B & BS, God knows what, one day I must get round to it all. He had a sense of the past – he was an Englishman. My sisters don’t believe in that kind of thing. My mother threw everything away when she left for California, to go and live with Lucia.’

  I was half-listening to the programme. He-Man, the twentieth century’s answer to sweaty old lionclad Hercules, pectorals undulating marvellously to the animator’s art above creaseless Y-fronts, was contending on the screen with a monster from a Hindu temple, helped along by an aerobic beauty of pink vinyl with laminated hair, also pink. It’s my job at the museum to catalogue book trade spin-offs, cereal packet offers of free stickers and games and what have you, and I’m proud that my subject catalogue has longer entries under Z and Q and X than any other in the world. (There’s a Z collection in a local library somewhere, Walthamstow, I think, where Zola and The Prisoner of Zenda and Zoos – the Case Against are corralled together in a sort of bibliophiles’ kinship system, but it’s minor compared to my collection, which has the virtue besides of species resemblance.) So I’m always on the lookout for newcomers to the cast: Q’S and X’S especially. He might be surprised to know it, but He-Man often helps me in my quest.

  From The Duel

  DOLMETTA, 1931

  It was May, the morning flecked the courtyard with live shadows, blue and green, for the sun had not yet reached the crucible heat of summer. Henbane and eyebright were springing in the crevices of the walls, and on the ground, grass tufts gleamed, still glossy before the dust came; the wisteria branched up the southern wall, its twisting, hempen stems loaded with butterfly-winged racemes of pale lavender flushing to purple. The scent was prodigious: it was a magnificent testimony to nature’s lavishness, thought the father, as he fluffed the bole of his shaving brush in the soap – the wisteria would need only a hundredth, a thousandth of the perfume it expended to attract enough bees to cross-fertilise the whole of the province. Nature chose the part of pleasure – it was clear to anyone with eyes and a nose that purely utilitarian theories of natural selection were absurd. Nature desired to delight and knew how to, he decided, as he twirled the bristles in the waxy jade tablet made from last year’s olive crop, and watched the pale lather rise. He spread the warm froth from ear to ear. There were one or two white hairs in his moustache, he noted. He would tweak them out, later.

  Larks were singing out over the field to the west and the air stirred in the wisteria clusters, blowing their honey about the countryside; now and then crickets started up their sibilance in chorus, as if a conductor were bringing them in on cue, and the pigeons, which filled a pie or two in
the winter months and provided down for the coverlets on all their beds, billed dozily in the dovecotes at each corner of the small stone farmhouse.

  With his savings – such as they were – Davide Pittagora had leased the house near Dolmetta, with two and a half hectares around it, on his return to Ninfania from America in 1922; he had tried ever since to make the farm yield enough olive oil and wine to break even. Without success. But the house beckoned the family from their stuffy apartment in Riba, the city on the coast, at every opportunity. It stood in a shallow depression, a little more than a mile inland from the Adriatic, with high walls around and tiny pepperpot turrets at each of the four corners of the upper storey. Remnants of the bartizans which once fortified all isolated country buildings against bandits, they had been perforated by a previous leaseholder so that doves could pop in and out. For Davide Pittagora, the Small Farm recalled his grandparents’, just outside Rupe where he was born; it restored Maria Filippa his wife to the fields and orchards of her childhood.

  Davide took up his razor, unfolded the blade from the sheath, angled it to his jawbone and began to plane over his face, tilting his head to one side and then the other, but keeping it in view in the round mirror that stood on a slender brass pole with an adjustable screw above the basin and ewer on the small mahogany stand that he had brought out into the yard that bright May morning. The mirror was at the highest point on the shaft: Maria Filippa had made sure when she visited the store in the city that the mirror could slide up high enough to reflect a man who was one metre eighty-two. ‘Nearly two metres tall? What’s the air like up there for him?’ the salesman chaffed. ‘What do you do for company, visit the giraffes? And how does one kiss this giant? From a footstool, perhaps? Or from a ladder?’ And Maria Filippa had smiled, and said, Yes, her husband really was very tall, and it was a most distinguished thing in a man. When the two of them walked together, friends joked that they looked like the definite article il, she was so small. No one knew where his height had come from; his own father came up to his shoulder, and as for Nunzia, his mother, she joked that when he was fourteen, she could already pass under his legs without bending over.