Property of Blood Page 12

‘That’s the Captain’s business. I just chat to the family, keep them cooperating. Anyway, what was I supposed to notice?’

  ‘Listen. The wind’s dropped.’

  Seven

  That morning, for the first time, my face wasn’t cut by the icy wind the moment I put my head out of the tent. I had become used to it and even looked forward to it because it was a contact, a presence I could feel, a strong, exhilarating touch that penetrated my isolation in a dark undersea world. And then the freezing cold made me glad to crawl back into my prison and snuggle into the residual warmth between my sleeping bag and coat. But that morning when I crawled out, there was a sense of emptiness. The air smelled quite different, earthy and damp. It was much warmer. After the morning routine, I sat at the entrance of the tent with my legs outside and my boots on. This was a recent victory. I had been so careful and quiet and obedient that I was given my boots each morning and the chain padlocked over them so that I could go outside instead of using the bedpan inside the tent. I followed my chain, pulling it taut until I reached my tree and they brought the bedpan. I don’t know how to make you understand what that meant to me but, believe me, it gave me back the sense of being a human being which I had been losing. I took with me wads of toilet paper and wet paper napkins to clean myself and my hands. If it didn’t bother me much to do all this in front of whoever was guarding me, that’s probably because I couldn’t see anything or hear much and so felt enclosed in a private world. Afterwards I sat with my feet outside the tent and had breakfast. They had never given me milky coffee with bread again, the one thing that was easy for me to swallow, after the first two or three days. I suppose they couldn’t be bothered feeding it to me, and the one time I had asked them to let me try alone I spilled almost all of it. I remember it rolling down my neck and slopping onto my chest. I had no other clothes then. It was only much later that they brought me a tracksuit.

  ‘So, that morning, it was the rubbery bread and hard Parmesan again that was still so difficult for me to get down. The worst of it was that I couldn’t spend long trying to chew it because they wanted to get on and would take it from me. Even so, it was a luxury to sit almost outside the tent and breathe the clean air. I was careful not to turn my face to the sky, searching for the morning sun, because this was seen as “detective work” by them and the one time I tried it my head was slapped down.

  ‘Another victory: The heavy chain on my ankle was always kept much too tight and after some days I was pretty sure there was a wound there. I asked Woodcutter to look at it one morning and he brought something to put on it next day. He also put plastic tubing on the chain—like you use on a bicycle—and some padding and plasters on my ankle. Why couldn’t they just keep it less tight? It was ridiculous. I decided then that the next things I would try for were an apple or something, anything fresh to eat—I needed vitamins—and a little piece of soap. I had waited my chance and talked to Woodcutter when he was alone. Up to now I had only requested the apple. One thing at a time. Soap was less important. ‘I had worked out, by this time, that there were usually two of them present in the evening but that Woodcutter was there most often. I also knew, though he never came near me, that there was a boss of whom all of them were afraid. I knew this because sometimes when I asked Woodcutter for some new concession he would speak with his lips to my bandaged ear and say, “Can’t. Boss’s orders.” I was quite sure he was telling the truth.

  ‘I worked out other things, too. For instance, my hearing, adapting to the plugs, began to discern things and recognized their new, muffled quality.

  ‘Plaff! Plaff, plaff! A noise like the wax falling into my ears, but distant. Hunters! No wonder my captors hadn’t hesitated to signal each other with rifles. Remembering our arrival here on hands and knees, I realized that they were probably hunting wild boar and would certainly have a pack of dogs with them. I spent, or wasted, hours imagining their coming across this hide-out by accident, led by curious dogs. I invented a dozen scenarios which resulted in my being saved. I even decided the precise moment at which I could risk calling out, “Help me! I’m here! Help me!” But my real world overturned the invented one each time for two reasons: The first was that should they spot this encampment, even see my armed captors, they would surely think it was a group of other hunters and move away to a patch of their own; the other, which is more difficult to explain, was that I had promised good behaviour and silence to Woodcutter as a necessary requisite of my survival, which he guaranteed in turn. Had the hunters discovered me in the first few days I would have screamed my heart out. Not anymore. They had subdued me. I had given my word. I would remain silent. Plaff! Plaff! plaff! On those days they were edgy, all of them, including Woodcutter. After a while I recalled that hunting was prohibited on Tuesdays and Fridays. I have never hunted but we have a small cottage in the country and I only ever let Tessie run around free on non-hunting days. I’ve known so many dogs shot, some by accident, some on purpose. Non-hunting days were the ones when I would take care to sense the period when Woodcutter was alone, partly for the human comfort and partly so as to gain more small concessions.

  ‘It was about the time when I understood about the hunters that there was an improvement in the food. Woodcutter explained to me that when the mistake of taking me instead of my daughter was discovered, there had been a lot of quarrelling and economic difficulties. He didn’t give me any details, for obvious reasons; he just kept saying, “It’s a right cock-up.”

  ‘Then, at some point, the boss had adapted himself to the new situation and, I suppose, decided to invest a few thousand lire in keeping me alive. I should say in keeping us all alive because my guards ate and drank what I ate and drank, which, for that whole first period, was nothing but bread, Parmesan, wine, and water. Then, one late morning, a wonderful odour of cooking filtered into my tent, and when the zip went up and I presented myself at the opening, my tray held a plate of something hot. It was spaghetti with tomato sauce! The scent which had reached me before was the garlic frying in olive oil for the sauce. Woodcutter placed a spoon in my right hand.

  “‘I’ve cut it up for you. It would get stone-cold if you tried to eat it with a fork. The flask is here on your right.”

  “‘Thank you.” Spaghetti and red wine! It was inevitable that I wasn’t able to eat much, even though the first scent of it had awakened something of an appetite and dissolved the lump of terror that had been blocking my throat. By now, I just wanted to live, even if I had to live like this. I tried desperately to get it all down so as to show gratitude. Otherwise they might not bother again and I had to have enough nourishment. It tasted wonderful but my jaw was soon hurting, my ears in agony, my shrunken stomach protesting.

  “‘You’re an excellent cook,” I enthused to Woodcutter, wanting to be forgiven for not finishing the food, not wanting him to sneer at the rich bitch. “The scent of this tomato sauce awoke my appetite for the first time.” Did he understand? He didn’t sneer at me. He wasn’t angry, either, when I explained that my stomach had shrunk and that I’d need time to get used to eating normally.

  ‘As I sat now with my tray beside me, awaiting orders to go in, I smelled coffee. Toasty coffee, hot and fresh on the morning air! I was overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia for mornings at home, the news on the radio, Caterina’s soft tangles of hair, her crumpled white silk dressing gown. The feeling was so acute that I refused the coffee itself, saying to Woodcutter, ‘You have it all. Just the smell of it is enough for me.”

  I really meant it. I was quite content without, but he answered me curtly, “There’s enough for everybody. Once it’s made, it’s made.”

  'He didn’t understand. How could he? The hot cup was put into my hind and I drank. Then he put something else in my hand. An apple! I needed vitamins but I could hardly bear to begin eating it. I sniffed at it, pressed its smooth, cold skin to my cheek, imagined its colour—I felt sure it was a Granny Smith. I nursed it until it became warm in my hands, and thought of my student days i
n upstate New York where the autumn meant wet fallen leaves along the country roads and barrows from which mountains of crisp, juicy red apples and jars of cider and cider vinegar were sold. How ignorant I was then of the sad realities of the world. I tried to imagine what it would have meant to me if I’d read in the papers of some woman being kidnapped far away in Italy and kept chained to a tree by bandits.

  ‘Nothing, of course. It would have had no reality just as that faraway world of my student days had no reality now. It had the quality of a dream, of something I had observed, the way we observe ourselves doing things in dreams rather than being the protagonist. If I ever returned to the normal world again I would have to put the two broken selves back together, myself before, myself after this episode. In the meantime I must concentrate on survival and that meant on detail, on small victories, on my apple. I ate the whole thing except for the stalk, which I plucked off. I ate the core and chewed the pips, which tasted like almonds. I wanted to do this but there was also an element of show in it. Again, I didn’t want to be the rich bitch whose only way of eating an apple was to peel and slice it with silver cutlery in some elegant restaurant. It was true that I had been eating apples that way ever since I married, but in those sunny student autumns we bit into their crispness like children and the juice trickled down our chins. I did this now, though I had to nibble rather than bite because of the pain it caused me to open my jaws. They noticed and they sensed the falseness of my eating the core. Woodcutter was watching me, I could feel it.

  “‘You don’t normally eat the core, what’s that about?”

  “‘It tastes good, the pips taste of almonds. I ate apples this way as a child and at university, too. I was in a place where they grew wonderful apples.”

  ‘When the apple was finished, since nobody had yet told me to go inside, I sat on in the fresh air, thinking about my university days. I tried to remember the names of my fellow students but couldn’t, except for two or three. I had lost touch with all of them, with America altogether, in a way, except through my new persona as a businesswoman. So this imprisonment wasn’t the only fracture in my life. Leaving America, divorce … They happen without our noticing and so we don’t try to mend them. Perhaps I should think of trying to put all of my life back into one whole. Perhaps that’s the real reason for my wanting to show in New York. I put this idea to one side to look at later during my thinking time in the tent. As long as I was outside I wanted to enjoy remembering my university days. I had very little recollection of studying but I suppose I must have worked occasionally since I got through. It wasn’t at all difficult, not like here. My stomach felt a stab of anxiety as I wondered if I’d done wrong in encouraging Caterina to enroll in the Faculty of Letters. It isn’t easy in Florence. It’s overcrowded, disorganized, long-winded. She has only scraped through one exam out of a possible five in a year and a half so it already looks as if it was a mistake, decided on in a hurry to distract her from the disappointment about dancing …

  'A tap on my shoulder. Time to go back inside.

  “‘Thank you for the apple. Not just because it was delicious but because an apple or any other fresh fruit or greens will help me stay healthy, which is as important for you as it is for me, don’t you think?”

  “‘That’s enough. Take your boots off.”

  ‘The daily routine, morning ablutions, feeding, back inside, an attempt at flexing and stretching my muscles, thinking time, feeding, into the tent again, long thinking time, the chain and padlock on my wrist, sleeping bag, night, never varied. I didn’t want it to, unless the variation was my release. In the meantime, the routine was all, my civilization, my comfort. I greeted Woodcutter in the mornings and said goodnight to him each evening. He almost always answered me. Only occasionally was he curt, usually because of some disagreement with one of the other two or with the mysterious boss. I think eating the apple made me consider, for the first time, what a problem it must be to get supplies to such a remote place. I appreciated having mineral water and paper napkins and now even pasta. I thought, too, that the mystery of their insistence on rules of hygiene while never allowing me to wash myself properly was easily solved. Probably there was no source of water near at hand. An area that did have a stream would be frequented by wild boar and consequently by hunters. Until then I had only considered my own plight but from then on I had a clearer idea of theirs and began to take more notice. Not that my opinion of them on a personal level altered. I was still afraid of Butcher, still aware of the waves of hatred that came from him and his potential violence, which only Woodcutters presence curbed. The little claw-fingered one I called Fox often tried to play tricks on me and I was determined not to react. I hated the smell of him and especially disliked taking my food from him. Inevitably, my exaggerated gratitude on being given something different to eat was grist for his mill. One evening, as I sat at the entrance of the tent waiting to be fed, he came close and got hold of my right hand.

  “‘Here’s another treat for you, something different to eat.”

  ‘I was very wary since he’d done this before and Woodcutter had snatched the food from me before it reached my mouth. That time it had been a packaged square of cream cheese, thickly covered in green mould, he told me later. This time he put something warm in my hand and pushed my hand to my mouth. The distorted noise of his loud sniggers reached me as I recoiled from his penis with a gasp of dismay.

  ‘Then his voice whispered close to my sea-roaring ear, “What’s up, don’t you like it in the mouth? Want me to lick yours instead?”

  ‘It was one of the rare days when Woodcutter was absent, and I sweated in terror at the thought of what Fox and Butcher could do to me. But I think that Woodcutter was in command and answered directly to the boss for my well-being and they respected this when he was absent. More than once he had reminded me that I should be thankful to him for my being treated decently, and I was. I wouldn’t be able to recognize him—you do know that, don’t you? Not even his voice, so it was for my own good that I suffered so much pain.

  When Woodcutter was putting the chain on my ankle and was close to me I asked, “Are you going to do my eyes now?”

  “‘Later.”

  ‘What I really wanted to ask him was whether he had brought the newspaper with an article in it about me as he had promised, but I didn’t dare for fear of seeming a nuisance. He went away with my boots and I crawled inside and settled down, lying on top of the sleeping bag since it wasn’t at all cold. I had discovered that if I put my arms behind my neck and supported my head so that there was no pressure on those great stones in my ears, the pain was reduced to a bearable level. However, a few nights of sleeping in this position caused terrible pains in my shoulders so now I used a toilet roll as a neck support: I had come to look forward to this moment of retreat in the way you might look forward to settling down to watch a favourite TV programme. My entertainment was provided by my own thoughts and memories. I felt there was something luxurious in this, after years of running to stay in the same place, of juggling insufficient money, then later, the pressure to maintain the success I’d achieved. Only once, and that was as a small child, had I had this same feeling. I was recovering from an illness—measles, I think—and had to stay in bed. That special feeling of separateness that comes from lying quietly in your bed and hearing the world outside go on without you, voices you recognize calling to each other on the way to school, cars starting up, the radio and the vacuum cleaner downstairs. I had a colouring book and crayons, a jigsaw puzzle of horses in the snow, and a shiny new book—even in my musty tent I could recreate the delicious smell of the glossy cover and the fresh print—which I couldn’t read because my eyes hurt. At such a young age I already appreciated the luxury of those hours so totally my own. I can see you must find the comparison odd given that I was a chained captive in the tent but, apart from the chain itself, was I any freer as a child with measles? And Woodcutter was my nurse, responsible for me, feeding me, sometimes kind, sometimes
angry. I tried, at first, to fight against my growing dependence on him, but then I stopped fighting and let it take its course. Most things that happen naturally have a good reason for happening and I believe that if I hadn’t accepted it, hadn’t allowed myself to trust him, I would have died. The overt reason might have been an intestinal blockage, blood poisoning from the chain wound, whatever. But the real reason would have been that without that contact I couldn’t have saved myself. It was that or death and I wanted to live.

  ‘I must have relived everything I could remember of my childhood, good and bad, and my thoughts absorbed me so completely that the interruption for feeding was often unwelcome, especially under the stale bread and cheese regime, as I had no appetite and eating was a necessary mechanical process. I much preferred my mental wanderings. Leo is like me, I think. I know he’s always spent a lot of time with his own thoughts, even when he was quite small. Most often he was silent, concentrating on whatever he was drawing, but I would sometimes hear him humming or even talking quietly to himself. He lived a second, very intense life in his imagination, I think. I used to read to him in the evenings in English because at school everything was in Italian. I felt he should know his own literary heritage. So we read Tom Sawyer, Nicholas Nickleby, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And we read the Odyssey and the Iliad and some of the Bible in English, too. They were already so different, he and Caterina, even as small children. He could lose himself in his own imaginative world for hours but Caterina liked company. She liked someone there to talk to and she loved little presents, tiny dolls and miniature china animals. She had such a collection. I felt I ought to read to her as I had to Leo but she only wanted her father to read to her so it was always in Italian. You know the way girls are with their fathers. I wasn’t even allowed to be there if she had him! Then when he went she couldn’t bear to be left for a moment. No matter how busy I was, she would never do her homework alone, even though she always got angry if I tried to help her. She’d scream at me, “I can do it! But you’ve got to stay with me!”