A Picture is Worth 1000 Words, Page 2

  ***

  Their leathered, worn suntanned skin showed their age, and every wrinkle and line had a story to tell. Sandro would have told you what each stood for. The ones around his eyes for the times he had laughed, the ones over his forehead were each time he had been interrogated. The lines around his lips for each time he had kissed and those in other areas were the small trials and tribulations of life.

  Sandro and Nicoli looked out onto the street, waiting for fewer people. Neither wanted to speak until they were sure they were not overheard. They had always chosen the least obvious spot to meet. Never a railway station, there were too many eyes. A bar or café was too easy to be overheard. An open space; too obvious for two men meeting. The street had always been the clear choice, under a poster for easy recognition and always to do with a drink. Their safe words to meet had been decided on as Amber nectar. Both knew that was beer and Peroni was their favourite as younger men.

  ***

  During the first war they had risked so much, leaving behind their wives and young children. They had done it without hesitation, standing up for their own countrymen, not wanting the Germans to desecrate their towns and destroy their people. They had travelled between England, France and Italy and had been chosen because they had the ability to blend in well and spoke many languages. They were like chameleons able to adapt and almost become invisible. The second war had been even more intense but with them doing less of the leg work and more of the behind the scenes.

  ***

  “So what is so important that you drag me here, in the heat of the day to sit underneath the Amber nectar?” Nicoli asked with a rasping voice.

  “There has been an accident” Sandro replied, not looking at him but looking at the street.

  “What sort of accident?”

  “The sort we always dreaded.” Sandro tried hard to keep composure.

  “Her?” Nicoli’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Yes. I am so sorry.” Sandro wanted to put his hand on Nicoli’s shoulder but knew that was not a good idea to make such a gesture, even now there were eyes and ears everywhere waiting for them to make a move.

  Sandro and Nicoli had stayed hidden with their secrets for several years; they were wanted for their knowledge so meeting together was really very risky.

  “How?”

  “There was an explosion. No one is saying anything.” Sandro’s fists tightened, his knuckles started to go white.

  “Where, when and how do you know it’s her?” Nicoli’s blood had drained away from his face, the tanned skinned suddenly looked almost translucent.

  “The only word that is out there is Cinoma. You know where that is. We know it’s her, she was supposed to be working there under cover.” Sandro’s voice pushed through his teeth. “No one has heard from her and she never arrived at the safe house.”

  “Shhhhh, ” Nicoli hissed, “the young man...” They both looked as the young man who had been walking up the street with speed and confidence suddenly stopped and bent down as if to tie his shoelace. The men watched seeing that this was a ploy, there were no laces. He stood back up again and glanced at the men before moving forwards swiftly.

  “Dopo domain” Sandro hissed, “the day after tomorrow.”

  “I know what it means, I am Italian too remember.” Nicoli was annoyed with Sandro, he’d been switching between French, English and Italian for the last few minutes, and it was hard translating three languages in the same sentence.

  “We meet at the town square. It’s a cover up Nicoli; no one is admitting liability and they are saying it didn’t happen.”

  “Answers my friend” he replied. They stood up, without acknowledging one another, parting company in different directions. Shuffling rather than walking, with sorrow in their hearts.

  © Kate Price (2012)

  WE'RE ALL CONNECTED

  I wanted to go for a long walk today. It's dry and it’s not too cold. Living in the city has its problems but we could have gone somewhere nice. When your owner has you for company you would expect him to keep you company, and not meet a human friend every day at noon for some “conversation”. I've tried to communicate, but between eating, sleeping and going to the toilet there isn't much else to discuss at my age. Other than the walks. The roaming the Roman streets. Assessing the different pavements and tiles and steps and stones.

  ***

  John Pepper first visited Rome in the late 1960s as a lovelorn young man. Staying in a boarding house, he walked along the street everyday to wait for Rosa to have her lunch break from the clothes shop where she worked. One week away from his job, with all his savings spent, to persuade the beautiful Italian to return to England and marry him.

  His daily routine was the same, with little to do while she worked. A slow stroll, taking in the sights. As the week passed, he recognised the locals going about their daily routines. The young mothers pushing babies in prams, the head-scarved housewives with shopping baskets, the old men walking their dogs.

  Rosa and John always had lunch at a small bar next to her shop. She was so flattered by the attention of the tall, handsome man she had met during her visit to her English relations. When the letter arrived announcing his plans to visit Rome her heart had leapt. She hardly knew him. Her friends had laughed and teased that “l'inglese” would soon be on a plane to Rome.

  ***

  Franco and Enrico didn't have a lot to say to each other. Enrico had to walk his dog, Orlando, at noon and six pm. Franco liked to spend most of his day sitting on a chair on the pavement opposite his apartment watching the world go by. The world going by liked to watch Franco. The children passed by, and if he wasn't reading his paper, or talking to Enrico, they would always say hello, hoping for a small sweet from his tin. The widowed housewives eyed him with a smile, hoping for a smile back.

  Lonely Enrico they were less likely to talk to, the sad bachelor. The passersby were unaware that Franco and Enrico had first met twenty five years earlier, two businessmen unsure of the outcome on their businesses of the war. Two men who laid low rather than fight with or oppose against. They both remember June 4th 1944, the feeling that the Allied Forces has arrived for the good of Rome, but the war had left them both bitter, for several reasons.

  ***

  It isn’t really very comfortable spending an hour on the pavement while they chat. Sometimes there are some other dogs around, but mostly lots of human legs. The small smiley, skippy humans are the best, but sometimes the older ones, with scarves on their heads, they talk to me but not my owner and his friend. They seem scared to talk to other humans.

  ***

  John rushed to meet Rosa on the last day. As he passed those two old men with the dog, again, he stifled a cough. Rosa had warned him to be early for lunch, to meet her father and grandfather. If he had serious intentions over this incredible woman, he would have to make them known this lunchtime, he couldn't be late, and his dry throat was annoying him. John and Rosa sat at their table and John swiftly drunk half his glass of Peroni beer. Ten minutes late, calmly and in no hurry, here came Rosa's father and an old man. John looked at the old man, his clothes, his newspaper; he looked so familiar, where had he seen him before?

  ***

  Franco sat down at the table outside the bar. His lovely old shop was still here, but he didn’t like the clothes Carlo and Rosa chose now. The hard times he had endured, when it was so difficult to get fabric, now there were plenty of supplies, but the dresses had hardly any fabric in them. He turned his attention back to Rosa and the young man. Italy was full of men, why had she set her eyes on an English man? Then he thought about his dear, but sadly departed wife, her wild ways, was Rosa attracted to someone in the same way he had been, when he was the young man, when he was the heart-breaker?

  ***

  Enrico walked home with Orlando. They sat in their flat, by their balcony, looking out over the city. Orlando put his head down to sleep. Enrico picked up the photo frame on the side table and gaz
ed, not for the first afternoon, at beautiful Catherine, his wartime forces sweetheart, who in 1944 had married Franco who owned the clothes shop by the bar.

  ***

  We are back at our home, sitting by the window again. My owner is again in his quiet afternoon mood, where he will sit and think about the past, staring at that photograph, as if she were the only one in the world. I went to sleep. So nice to have a simple life with no complications.

  ***

  John Pepper, recently returned to Rome while the London Olympics were on. Staying in a hotel with views over the city he walked the streets every day, stopped to have lunch at small bars, watched the people going past, young, old, with their dogs.... His wife Rosa looked at him, he still was the only one in the world.

  © Carolyn T Gray* (2012)

  *With thanks for a flash of inspiration from singer/songwriter David Mumford and his “Dog song” when I was stuck with half a story...)

  THE SHOT

  It was the only evidence she had that he ever existed. When she looked at the faded photograph she could see why her grandson had selected it. It was stylish and full of movement. She sensed the accident of the moment that captured Joe Spinetti. It was the only thing to her knowledge that had.

  Her hands looked too pale all of a sudden, too old, too papery. Her fists were clenched tight, a crone's claws she thought. She sat back in her armchair and tried to relax. Her grandson would be home soon to get her permission to use the photograph that contained Joe Spinetti. She felt a little sick at the thought. To Bobby, she was nonina, his little grandmother. How could he really know what this picture meant to her, who Joe Spinetti was, how almost ridiculous it all was now, almost sixty years later.

  She looked at the old photo again. How had he even found the thing? She thought it was just discarded amongst hundreds of old photos Armando had kept from their time together in Turin. He was such a keen photographer she remembered fondly. Such a good man. He would be so proud one of his photographs would be used in a major international advertising campaign, and for his favourite beer too. She sniffed and made a face at the thought of it.

  She remembered the day Armando had taken it, setting up the shot, telling uncle Palmiro to keep talking to papa, keep it natural. It was a bright day, much brighter then it looked in the photograph. There had been a steady breeze and the smell of caramel from the bakery opposite. The sweet smell mixing with the scent of her perfume and the reek of cigarettes. She kept looking at the photograph. Santa Maria, she thought, there was Pippo, Armando's long dead spaniel - sniffing out for bits of discarded titbits. He was partly hidden behind uncle Palmiro as he spoke animatedly to papa, who was sitting outside that bar on the piazza. Birds were flying around them. Joseph Spinetti walking quickly past them, hurriedly throwing a cigarette into the gutter.

  These days she was always waiting . Waiting for her daughter to come and make her dinner, waiting for Zainab, the lady who came to give her tablets and waiting for the time when her breath would fade and rattle and death would come at last. She smiled slowly, her tracing paper skin stretching and creasing at the same time. How she had inhabited this body amazed her, she had now been a grandmother longer then she had been a woman. The photograph jogged her old lady's consciousness into the body of a young girl.

  Had the lens of the camera panned another ninety degrees, it would have seen her lithe young body, small boned limbs running towards Joe Spinetti. It would have seen her petite and symmetrical face contorted in concentration. Her blonde hair blowing about her as she ran. It would have shown a beautiful young woman, in her twenties dressed in smart Capri pants, trench coat, stripped shirt, plimsolls and a gash of red lipstick racing to stop Joseph Spinetti from getting away. He had waited for her, but the tram car was late and slowly Joseph Spinetti had lost his nerve.

  She had a secret from Armando. Through their forty years together she had never let him suspect. Through children, grandchildren, baking, pasta making, business, through countless moves From Turin, to Naples to London, through countless lives, she had never told him about Joseph Spinetti.

  Armando only knew Joseph in passing. Ironic, she thought, that the photograph captured him walking passed papa and uncle Palmiro, glancing briefly at Armando's camera by accident. As Joseph Spinetti passed them, he began to run down those crowed Turin streets, pursued by the beautiful woman with the red lips, people turned and wondered dark thoughts, as they do when they see a chase.

  She had been told by her contact to dispose of Joseph Spinetti. He had double-crossed the communists and been found out to have turned gladio, working for the CIA. She had been the Italian communist party's best covert operative. Blonde and pretty, no one suspected her of working for the PCI. That day she had a gun in her trench coat, and Joseph Spinetti, just as he saw Armando taking the photograph, suddenly realised why she was so eager to meet him in the alley. Neither she nor Joseph Spinetti had expected Armando and the old men to be sitting nearby. Joseph, uneasy, knew something was up, his time was up. And so he walked away. She remembered hearing later that Maffi from the Naples cell had killed him. And that was that, for a year, until Fausto, the village baker - a man she had known since she was a child and never suspected was also millitante, whispered in her ear one Sunday, after mass, that Joseph Spinetti was still at large.

  What followed was the sickening reality of her life. The wires and the secret messages that she tapped to an unknown contact in East Berlin, the gun, the secret meetings interspersed with long seasons of ordinary life all whirring like a machine. She was moved finally, they found a way to get Armando, dear innocent man that he was, a wonderful opportunity for promotion. Armando, the dreamer, who never did anything to further himself, made two meteoric rises in his council job, first a posting to Naples and soon after to London, where he was accountant to the London council. He never wanted it, he wanted to work in advertising. His poor feathered soul tethered to ledgers while she brought up his children and made ravioli. Somehow, over the years, the man (for she assumed he was a man) in Berlin stopped contacting her. Some days she forgot about Joseph Spinetti.

  ***

  Her grandson, Bobby, was a big shot in advertising, creative director. Armando would be so proud. He had gone through her old photographs looking for a nineteen-fifties "too cool for school" picture to use for their Italian beer client. And there was Joseph Spinetti again. And there she was. A life that never existed, soon to be displayed on buses and billboards, a day in a life of the woman about to kill Joseph Spinetti.

  © Jess Mookherjee (2012)

  LA DOLCE VITA

  Naples, Italy. November 1959.

  “Another godforsaken winter approaching,” Salvatore muttered to himself from his bench on the pavement of the Via Toledo. Life had turned bitter as the Cynar digestivo he drank after every meal. Wounded at the Battle of Caporetto during the Great War, his bad leg still throbbed 40 years on with the faded-rusty pain of embedded shrapnel. The short walk to his local café required a sturdy hickory cane, coaxing him along with each hobbled step. He carried with him the deadweight of over 300,000 Italian soldiers who died in that bloody battle alone - more than the total killed in World War II.

  Every day Salvatore arose early, washing and shaving his face using the ceramic basin beside his bed. He struggled to avoid the fretful image reflected in the tiny mirror alit by a solitary bulb dangling from the cracked-plaster ceiling. After dressing in the same weary, woollen suit and yellowing cotton shirt, he fastidiously knotted his faded silk tie, fingers shaking yet true to purpose from years of repetition. When autumn arrived, he pulled on his thick grey overcoat, fastening each button down to below his waist. Donning a fedora, he escaped out the door, slowly leaving behind the cavernous solitude of his one room flat.

  He would arrive at his bench long before the café was due to open. Waiting patiently, the remainder of his morning was spent reading yesterday’s Corriere della Sera before laying it at his side to watch in detachment as the up
-and-coming Italians and wealthy foreigners passed by in varying degrees of feigned happiness.

  * * *

  “Buon giorno Salvatore!” a raspy, smoke-filled call resonated from up the street. A dapper man emerged, pipe in mouth as always, striding confidently. The white hankie in his breast pocket and wide fedora completed the look of an aging gentleman, a world war younger than his compatriot. His spaniel companion sauntered beside him obediently and unleashed.

  “Buon giorno Battista,” responded Salvatore flatly, continuing to stare blankly across the street.

  “Why the heavy coat again? Can’t you see you are the only one wearing one today old man?”

  “You’re not a young man yourself,” responded Salvatore. “As I told you before, it is cold because I am cold. Need I say more?”

  “You don’t any sense these days old man – not that you ever did,” Battista responded, speaking with the opaque articulation of a man not bothered to take his pipe out from between his teeth.

  “You didn’t get the job I presume?” Salvatore goaded.

  “No – they gave it to a company from Milan. You know all the work goes up north now,” Battista retorted, the veneer of his light demeanour peeling away as his face reddened.

  “Yes, Naples was a lovely place before but now - who are these fancy people wandering about?”

  “The damn borghesia,” responded Battista. “They are taking work and money that would have been ours but for Il Duce.” He pulled his pipe abruptly from his mouth and spat in disgust against the wall behind him. He barely missed his dog who was preoccupied with the scent of a rival lingering by the old man’s bench. “Give me the fascists over these bloody socialists and communists any day.”