The Break Read online

  “And you shouldn’t be wandering the streets drunk at this hour,” Rosa said, lifting the oil lamp she had in her hand to get a better look at Dino. She looked him up and down and shook her head without saying a word, then turned with the lamp towards the masses of plants and flowers that filled the shop.

  “Let’s see,” Rosa said, “what you need is—”

  “I was thinking—”

  “You shut up,” Rosa said. “You don’t know anything about these things.”

  Rosa’s lamp roamed the shop. The place was a riot of leaves and colours and scents which quickly went to the head.

  “Ah, here we are,” Rosa said suddenly, in that old lady voice of hers. She stooped over a row of little green bushes, holding the lamp behind her to keep her balance. For a moment Dino was afraid she would fall on the floor or break in two as she stooped.

  Sighing with the effort, Rosa plunged her hand into a vase of tall, multicoloured roses. When, with a deep sigh of relaxation, she pulled her hand out again, it was clutching the long, sturdy stem of a huge red rose. Dino couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like it—the stem was more like a tree trunk, and the flower, which had lots and lots of big shiny petals, would be hard to hold even with both hands.

  “Where did you find that?”

  Rosa threw a glance at Dino, with a hint of a smile, then gazed at the flower. “There are things it’s better not to know,” she said as if it was some illegal substance.

  Rosa went behind the wooden counter, put the huge flower down on top of it, picked up a huge pair of shears and in one swift movement cut a few inches from the stem.

  Dino gave a start and screwed up his eyes.

  “Don’t worry, it’s good for it,” Rosa said, putting the shears aside.

  Then she took two or three branches of greenery from a vase next to it, dressed it with something that looked like lily of the valley, wrapped everything in a sheet of coarse paper, and put a red satin ribbon around it.

  “Go,” Rosa said, turning the stem of the flower towards Dino. “You’ll be fine with this. It’s better than a bunch of twenty-five normal roses.”

  Dino took the flower in his hand and thanked Rosa. For a moment, he felt quite moved. “What do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Go home, it’s late,” Rosa said, pushing him towards the exit. “And kiss that poor woman for me.”

  As Dino was about to leave, bending to get under the shutter, he took a last look at the old lady in her dressing gown. “Rosa,” he said, “don’t you wear dentures?”

  “I’ll give you dentures, idiot,” Rosa said, and to force him out landed a kick with her thin little leg in his shin, then slammed the shutter down in his face as hard as she could.

  When Dino got home, the silence between the walls seemed thicker than usual. He decided to get undressed in the entrance, and then very slowly eased himself into the bed, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  As usual, Sofia was lying on her side, facing the edge of the bed, with her legs slightly bent. Dino slipped in on his side, slid over until he was touching Sofia’s back, put his arm round her and laid the big rose right under her nose. The scent of the rose echoed in Sofia’s ears like the ringing of twenty bells.

  “Hi,” Sofia said after a few seconds, moving slightly closer to Dino.

  “Hi,” Dino whispered in her ear, and added, “I’m sorry,” hoping it was the right thing to say.

  “Don’t worry,” Sofia said, her voice still slurry with sleep.

  For a few moments silence fell again over the room, and the only thing that could be heard was the rose’s scent like a peal of bells.

  “You know, don’t you?” Dino said after a while, just before they fell asleep.

  “Yes, I know,” Sofia said, and without letting go of the rose pulled Dino even closer to her.

  Chapter Five

  DINO COULDN’T GET that damned question out of his head.

  That morning he had got to work as punctually as ever. Saeed and the others had seen him coming along the street with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He had arrived at his usual calm pace, and after greeting them with a brief nod had started putting his overalls on. They were resurfacing a wide street that led to the centre of town. They had already put down a base of earth and fine chippings, and now they had to water it, lay the stones, and smooth everything out with the jackhammer.

  Dino didn’t usually talk while he was working, although he always seemed fairly cheerful. Often he would whistle, or hum under his breath, some song he had learnt from a relative when he was little. It was apparently a habit he had got half from his aunt, half from his dad—she was always singing at the top of her voice, while he always maintained a solid wall of silence that seemed to conceal things bigger than himself. If he thought about it, Dino found both things equally annoying, and obviously, whether he liked it or not, he had taken a little from one and a little from the other.

  Today, though, Dino was more like his father. When he had finished putting on his overalls and lacing up his boots, he had sat for a moment with his elbows on his knees, heaved a little sigh and told Duilio and Blondie to smooth out the base one last time and then wash it down with water from the tanker. In the meantime, he and Saeed would start bringing the stones. They had been working together for years and there wasn’t really any need to say anything else for the rest of the day.

  Blondie had been the last to join them. Nobody had ever discovered where Dino had found him. One day, Dino had simply gone to Giani, the boss, and asked him if he could hire the boy to help out. Giani had looked through the glass door at the thin, blond young man sitting wearily on a wooden bench just outside.

  “Why do you need anyone else?” Giani had asked, tidying a few papers on his desk.

  “To teach him the trade,” Dino had said.

  Giani had looked him in the eyes for a moment, then carried on sorting through the papers. “Aren’t Duilio and the black guy enough?”

  “Duilio’s getting old, and I don’t know how much longer he can last. If he quits, I need someone who already knows the work. Remember the problems we had that time with Giorgione.”

  Giorgione had died suddenly one night in the middle of February. He had gone to bed at night as if everything was normal and in the morning his wife had found him lying dead beside her. A weak heart, the doctor had told Dino one day when they had happened to find themselves together in a bar. For the first time, it had struck Dino that inside everyone’s chest there was an animal with a soul and a personality all of its own, capable or not of withstanding the stresses and strains of the world, and, as he shook the doctor’s hand and watched him walk away, he had wondered what kind of animal his was.

  Anyway, overnight Dino had found himself working only with Duilio, who to be honest wasn’t quite his old self any more. He thought for a whole day about who he could get to replace Giorgone, then he remembered that black bricklayer he had seen once unloading huge weights all by himself and throwing mortar with the trowel at a hole fifteen metres away, hitting it, and laughing with his workmates. The last time he had seen him, though, he had been wasting time drinking in an old-fashioned bar on the other side of town. Dino had gone there and asked the owner about him, and had been pointed to the far end of the room. Saeed was sitting with a half-empty glass in his hand, staring into space. Apparently nobody wanted to give him work, because he was black—or rather, not so much because he was black, but because he wasn’t local, and nobody wanted to take work away from local people and give it to foreigners.

  “I don’t give a damn where you’re from. As long as you clean yourself up, stop drinking, and work the way I saw you work on that house on the other side of the river, then you have a job.”

  Giani wasn’t at all sure that Duilio was too old. He had looked out again at the young man sitting on the bench. “Doesn’t look too bright to me,” he had said, looking again at Dino.

  “He’s a quick learner, you’ll see,” Di
no had said.

  Giani had turned to look at the young man again for a few moments, then looked back at Dino, trying to figure out if there was some kind of ulterior motive.

  “Half pay, Dino. That’s the best I can do.”

  “All right,” Dino had said, and had shaken Giani’s hand and left with the young man.

  Nobody, not Duilio, not Saeed, had really looked into whether there was an ulterior motive to the boy’s hiring, and, knowing Dino, they knew that asking questions would be a waste of time. In any case, they had soon got used to Blondie’s impassivity and his silences and, especially, his great appetite for work.

  Dino spent the whole morning bent over the road. On his knees, he wore those big protective pads that Sofia, much to everyone’s delight, had sewn for the men. He would bend over the ground, grab a stone, push it into the still partly wet base layer, pick up the small rock hammer, which was quite old and worn now, give the stone a few knocks with it to adjust its position, lay a piece of wood over it to make sure it was level with the others, and if, as was usually the case, it was already fine, he would put down the hammer and grab another stone. And so it went on, stone by stone.

  There was no precise logic to the way you placed the stones. It was something that had puzzled him when, still a child, trying to place a stone, he had asked his father what distance from the others it should go.

  “Trust your eye,” his father had said, in that voice of his that always seemed to be breaking through a wall from another world.

  Dino had straightened up and looked at his father with an almost scared expression. “What do you mean, trust your eye?”

  He had raised his head and squinted at his son. “That’s right, your eye,” he had said.

  In some strange way that he didn’t understand, Dino had realised that something was happening at that moment which would mark him for the rest of his life.

  “Isn’t there a specific order?” he had asked.

  Dino’s father had found it strange to hear those words used by a child, especially his own son, and for a moment he had sensed something new and unknown. “No, Dino, there’s no specific order,” he had said, in a voice that wouldn’t have been expected of him.

  “Oh,” Dino had said, and had watched his father get back to work.

  All at once life had taken a different turn. What, up until that moment, he had recognised, consciously or unconsciously, as the world, had turned all at once into a place in which people walked down streets where there was no specific order. From one moment to the next, what Dino had innocently thought of as perfect was flawed by a logic that didn’t exist, or at least a logic he didn’t know. Gradually, after those first feelings of dismay, undeclared but profound, he had learnt to absorb that revelation, and had even found it more bearable after a time, because, whether you liked it or not, whether you accepted it or not, there still had to be some kind of logic to the laying of those damned stones. Why was it that every time Dino’s father looked at a piece of roadway that had been laid by someone else, he could point to a particular spot and say, “That stone isn’t straight”? And if you went and had a look at the stone that Dino’s father had indicated, you saw that in fact it wasn’t straight. You didn’t know exactly why or how, and yet if you looked at that stretch of road as a whole, however well surfaced it was, you couldn’t deny that in the exact spot indicated by Dino’s father, there was a crack, a fissure in that system governed by unknown rules. And so, stone by stone, day by day, year by year, Dino had given up trying to understand the rules of that system, but had somehow found his own place within it and had learnt to lay those damn stones the way they were supposed to be laid.

  Dino spent all morning kneeling on the road with Saeed and Duilio, without whistling or humming a song. And at lunchtime, still in silence, he had unwrapped his roll from a large piece of brown paper and had sat down to one side to eat it, without saying a word, occasionally taking a sip of water from a clear glass bottle.

  After a while, Saeed and Blondie had gone off somewhere for a coffee and a quick tipple, and Dino and Duilio had stayed there to finish their lunch in silence. Duilio was eating with a fork from a little metal pot prepared for him by his wife and every now and again knocking back a gulp of wine from a flask. Some years earlier, when for some reason Dino had started taking an interest in Duilio’s health, he had told him that he shouldn’t drink all that wine.

  “And you shouldn’t drink all that water,” Duilio had replied, and that was the end of it.

  Dino took another bite of his roll, chewing the crust vigorously and screwing up his face slightly as he did so, and drank some water, then swallowed the whole lump. As he tried to remove a hard piece from his molars he looked up at Duilio and said, “How many stones do you think it takes to make a person?”

  Duilio looked up at Dino with a puzzled expression. Duilio was a worker of the old school, all twisted and gnarled and wrinkled like a hundred-year-old, but in his way as tough and strong as a mule, with the kind of straightforward relationship to things, and to the earth, that was on its way out. He was from the same generation as Dino’s father, and they had worked together for years, which was what kept Dino and Duilio both united and distant.

  “How many stones does it take to make what?” Duilio asked, screwing up his face.

  “A person, Duilio.” Dino raised his voice. “A PERSON.”

  “Oh,” Duilio said, nodding as if it was a perfectly normal question, then looked off to one side, thought about it for a moment and turned back to Dino with a puzzled look. “A person? What do you mean, a person?”

  Dino stuck one finger in his mouth, trying to get to that piece of hard bread, but without much success. “I don’t know, Duilio, it’s just something that came into my head.”

  “Oh,” Duilio said, looking off to the side again. He sat there for a while, quite still, with his fork stuck in the little pot, staring at the road, while Dino took another bite of his roll.

  “A lot, anyway,” Duilio said after a while, and continued eating his lunch.

  Chapter Six

  SOFIA WAS WALKING along the pavement with quick, resolute steps, keeping close to the old stone walls. She turned left into a side street, and walked along it until she reached that small enclosed square which somehow always managed to be in the sun. She came to a large dark wooden door and rang the bell.

  After a few moments, the door was opened by a somewhat elderly lady in a white coat with two or three pens stuck in her front pocket.

  “Hello,” the lady said, standing in the entrance, with her hand on the heavy wooden door.

  “Hello,” Sofia said.

  The two women sized each other up for a few seconds without saying anything.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked, tilting her head slightly to one side.

  “I’d like to see the doctor,” Sofia said.

  The woman frowned slightly. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked, thinking she already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” Sofia said. “I’ve had an appointment for nine years.”

  The lady’s head gave a little jerk backwards. She stared at Sofia for a second. “Oh,” she said. “Please come in.”

  The lady in the white coat led her into a hall with rugs on the floor and a little wooden table in a corner, facing the entrance. She then opened a door to her left and asked Sofia to sit down and wait.

  The room had a terracotta floor and another rug, a large round one. Along all four walls were chairs of different kinds, and in the middle was a large low table covered in newspapers and magazines. Sofia sat down on the small chair in the corner and placed her bag on her knees.

  “Who should I say?” the woman asked, almost embarrassed now.

  “Sofia, the dressmaker,” Sofia said.

  There had been a period, some years earlier, when Sofia and Dino had tried for a long time to have children but nothing had happened.

  One morning, as Sofia, silent as always, was wrapping cloth
es for a lady in the brown paper that Gianni brought her—from where, nobody knew—the lady had said, “My cousin might be able to do something for you.”

  For the first time in her life, Sofia had felt heat move in a wave from her neck up into her face and tingle like grains of rice beneath her cheeks and her forehead. Months later, when she had seen a young girl blush in the street, she had wondered if that was what had happened to her, too, remembering it as a not very pleasant sensation.

  “That’ll be seven, and this one’s five,” Sofia had said to the lady, not even looking her in the eyes.

  The lady had calmly handed over the money, then walked away across the terracotta floor with a slight shrug of her shoulders, which Sofia didn’t quite know how to interpret.

  That evening, on her way home, Sofia had passed the greengrocer’s stall. The greengrocer was a small plump woman, who for some reason always came to work in a skirt and evening shoes. Sofia had gone up to the stall and stuck a big sewing needle into an orange as big as a melon.

  “The next time I can sew on a mouth and ears,” Sofia had said and continued on her way.

  The greengrocer had stood there like a stone, looking at that huge needle planted in her orange, and the drop of pulp already starting to trickle down one side. The greengrocer wasn’t quite sure why, but that evening, when she returned home, she had put the orange with the needle in it over the fireplace, and there it had stayed.

  Sofia had forgotten all about that, and when, a few weeks later, the lady had come back to her shop with the usual blouses and skirts to be mended, she hadn’t taken much notice of her.

  But she and Dino had still not had a child, and for the first and last time Sofia had wondered if it was right to give life a push in a certain direction instead of taking it as it came. She had thought about it for a few days until she was tired of thinking, and then, one day when the lady came to collect a blouse the neck of which had become threadbare, Sofia had told her that she had thought about it, and that she would be pleased to have her cousin’s address. The lady had been caught unawares, and for a moment had looked Sofia straight in the eyes. The two women had confronted one another for a moment like two blockhouses, with that small dark wooden counter between them keeping them at a distance like a trench, silently manoeuvring in a battle that had been going on for centuries.