were the Lepini Mountains. To the south-west lay the Tyrrhenian sea. Between them lay two long parallel sections of disparate marsh, separated by the ghost of the coastline of hundreds of thousands of years ago: a long long dune, more or less parallel with the coast and the mountains between which it reclines, known as the Quaternary Dune. This dune made a barrier just high enough to keep inside it all the water from the mountains and rivers around: it all ended up there with no way over the dune to the sea, trickling about aimlessly on the flat, flooding the whole plain each autumn, leaving all the silt and mud it brought down with it, vaguely making its way forty kilometres south-east to Terracina, solidifying a little as it dried out in the summer, before welcoming a new season’s rain and silt. This was the plain of Piscinara. Outside it, between the dune and the new coast, lay the second sweep of marshes. Nero had dug a canal through the Quaternary Dune to drain Piscinara; it had silted up. Napoleon and Garibaldi and Leonardo and countless Popes and Prussians and speculators and aristocrats had tried and tried to drain these places. And failed.
Aldo was smiling as the train drew in. He’d stared down at the marshes from Sezze and Cisterna. The surveyors were ready, maps and designs on their way.
We’re going to dig a bloody great canal from the top of the plain to the sea, and all the water will drain into it, the mountain streams and the rivers, the Fosso di Cisterna, the Teppia, the Fosso Moscarello … all the rain, all the snowmelt, all the sludge. We’re going to bring electricity from Cisterna in giant cables, blow up any rocks that get in our way, dig and dig and dig.
Next year, Aldo thought, with a little shiver of pride. He had been having ideas as well for the other end of the project: how about mosquito netting; lovely little netted-in verandahs on the front of each house, so people could still sit outside but have an extra layer of protection? Just until we’ve wiped the cursed insects out …
What a job! What a wonderful job!
Next year, he thought, I’ll invite the English down to see how we’re doing.
Susanna Norsa had spent her early life praying, sewing, and listening politely to her aunts and their friends as they prayed and sewed. She fully expected to spend her entire life in variations of this scene: moving up in role from niece to aunt, from aunt to great-aunt, perhaps; to mother and grandmother, if her father arranged things so. She hadn’t thought much beyond it. There was no reason to. Nobody had ever suggested it. And she loved to embroider. And outside was quite dirty.
One of the aunts, a tiresome dissatisfied Aunt Rebecca, given to sighing and wishing for things, told her one afternoon behind the white linen curtains, in the shaded hush of siesta, that there was a painting, in a church, of their ancestors. Susanna could hardly believe her. Church was nothing to do with them. Why would Christians have a painting of Jews in their church?
‘Our ancestor Daniele did something very wicked,’ Aunt Rebecca whispered, toxic and gleeful. ‘He and his son Isaac. I don’t know what so don’t pester me asking about it. You will never know. It is forbidden. It is the church on via Monteverdi. Santa Maria della Vittoria.’
Susanna asked her father. She was not afraid of him.
He – bearded, arch-browed, a man unchanged for generations – said: ‘It’s the way of things that we are tolerated, not welcomed. It’s always been thus. If we are quiet, all is well.’ She did not press. She had never felt the need for her own wisdom, and she liked quiet.
The year Susanna turned fourteen, a quick and vicious surge of something incomprehensible rose in her, and she found her customary logic and her habits of obedience quite unsatisfactory. For absolutely no reason, coming home from school one afternoon, she turned away from the route, removed her headscarf, tucked in her white collar, and strode off, guilty feet striking the street, to via Monteverdi. There was a church: white, stucco, its portico the gay shape of a woman curtseying in a long skirt, holding up the cloth. It was not that one. It was naked brick, tucked into the corner, small and imperturbable. Her pause at the door was brief. It had to be, or she would never dare enter. She entered. She did not burn up like a dead leaf in a fire. There was a painting, and another … she found her ancestors. Two men and two women, in a row, on a panel alone at the bottom of a painting of someone else’s glory. The younger man would be Isaac.
Susanna’s rebellious surge did not last long, but she retained this one small act of independence: going without permission, in clothing as un-Jewish-looking as she could muster, to the church where the painting hung, to look at Isaac’s handsome face, full of ritegno, a holding back, a dignity. She developed and bore, on his behalf, a rich prideful resentment which gave purpose and value to the dappled shadow of shame that her name, in that town, had carried for hundreds of years. When she learnt the complex story, of how Daniele had whitewashed over a fresco of the Virgin Mary on the wall of his house, and paid a dozen punishments for it, it simply made her prouder of Isaac. He had stood by his father, suffered alongside him. She felt the blessing of not being alive at that time, four hundred years ago, when a Jew could be fined and tormented over and over for doing something he’d been given permission to do. When she visited Isaac, she talked to him. Soon enough she came to love him. She prayed for him when they prayed for the dead.
When she met Aldo, the handsome engineering student, he looked to her like Isaac Norsa – only with the ineffable advantage of being alive. Aldo knew and loved the past but his talk was all of the future. To him Trent was not ancient anti-Semitic scandals about who had accused who of making matzohs with the blood of a small boy in 1475, but Italian land redeemed, finally, from foreigners by the blood of Italian soldiers, including a little of his own. He had served on the Isonzo, he had been one of the straws whirled on the vast chaotic floodtides of Caporetto.
When Aldo spoke of the new Italy; of the sacrifices made, of the need for discipline and cleanliness and order and common sense, Susanna’s rather weary young heart lit up. Hers was not a fancy family; not wealthy, not ambitious. All that was required was respectable survival at a level which permitted charitable donations and decent marriage prospects. Had Susanna’s infatuation with the portrait been known, it would not have been comprehended in the slightest. Her infatuation with Aldo produced much the same response, among the embroidered linen tablecloths and the carefully polished glasses.
But to Susanna, here was a man with passion enough for two. Yes, he lectured. But so he should! He knew so much, and he shared it. He knew about Daniele and Isaac – and he knew about the future too. She listened carefully, head down, ears wide open. ‘The regiments who let us down at Caporetto – do you know who they were? They were full of the munitions workers from Turin – the ones who had been rioting. Yes! Sent to the middle of our campaign as a punishment. Not the most intelligent bit of planning. And everyone knew they were going to give themselves up. Why would people like that have any loyalty to their country?’ Susanna could not answer. She knew nothing. But that was all right, because no answer was required. ‘They made no secret of it. Their officers locked themselves in at night, in fear of their own men. They didn’t even consider themselves to be in the army! Some of them refused their tobacco and charity socks – they said they didn’t qualify to receive them – tell me, Susanna, how can good Italians be brought to this treachery? To plan in advance to surrender, and for nobody to notice that?’
She shook her head sadly in agreement, and glanced up at him. ‘For our generals,’ he would continue, ‘to put these revolutionaries, these communists, right in the middle of this most important battle – ah, my dear, don’t you think we can do better? Aren’t we the oldest civilisation in the world? Can’t we save these misguided men from the tempting garbage they hear from the communists? And give them back their pride?’
Her adoration transferred as easily as a leaf falls. Leaving Mantua with Aldo, she chose to leave behind there her respectable relatives alongside the ancestral innamorato and all that he entailed, and devote herself instead to the future, to faith and trust and the glorious light of the sun, and to the beautiful Italian children she would have with this adorable, important man.
Of course it had not been quite like that.