Devotion - Louisa Young

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colder water. Tectonic plates! he thought. Marine cliff-faces. Here be monsters. The drop-off was marked by a swathe of tall narrow tubular reeds, growing like an inner halo all around the lake. (Later he knew them well. You could break them off and use the pointed ends to pick your teeth. They’d draw blood on your gums if you weren’t careful. If you broke them open the inside was a strange almost-solid white foam.) Then just beyond the reed-bed was a bed of weeds: to go out into the lake proper, to dive and frolic in deep water beyond this little safe shallow harbour, you had to swim through those weeds. Their long subaqueous strands bore leaves like the glass leaves on Venetian necklaces, and jewel-coloured dragonflies were alighting on their tiny tufts, which just pierced the surface, as if for that very purpose. Below, the misty slime-clad stalks gradually became invisible, disappearing down into the cold depths. They trailed against Tom’s legs like something which might grab his ankle and pull him down. Tom swam through fast, front crawl, legs kicking mightily. The water was superb; an unspeakable joy.

      He came out shaking parabolas of iridescent water drops off into the sunlight, and lay himself down. Can’t I be a lizard, and lie in the heat, on the black sand, immobile? I shall soak in all the sun till the sun is all used up; I shall radiate, I shall never ever move. Above him, twinkling poplar leaves, tiny blades against the bluest sky. Around him, a very low buzz, the quietest hottest most silent sound: one insect, perhaps, dozing off. Beneath him, a thin worn towel and the heat of the black sand coming through it. To one side: the lividly green field, riven with swampy irrigation channels, and spangled in the mornings with bright blue chicory flowers which, he would learn, at the stroke of noon folded their stringy petals in and disappeared till the next day. And just there, inches from his pale toes, the round and lovely lake. No wind yet – that, he would learn, came later, after the chicory had retired. No movement, no ripple. A slight smell of what Nenna called mentuccia – mentoooooooo-cha. How she mocked his accent. How he mocked hers. Late morning. Summer. Bliss. Swallows and swifts dipping and softly cheeping, way overhead. When he asked the name of anything, he got a shrug and a word meaning something like ‘fat face’ or ‘Chatterbox’, or else ‘you can’t translate it’. He looked things up in the Latin dictionary, in case there was a connection, like lacerta and lucertola: lizard. Rondine, rondone, rondicchio: swallow, swift, martin. He kept sketchbooks, and wrote everything down: sizes and colours, where he’d seen it, what time of day, what it was doing. His little drawings were not only accurate, they were charming.

      Nadine and Kitty came wandering back. They had seen a massive tree stump, semi-submerged, which looked like a horse’s head. You could see the castle of Bracciano from just round there, and there was a rock you could sit on, out in the water. Kitty and Nenna had swum out to it; they looked such mermaids with their hair.

      And now they could hear Susanna calling them to lunch; her voice faint down two fields and across the little road. Tom’s greed woke his hunger, and he rolled over. He could see Nenna, out in the water. She had made a coronet out of the emerald weeds and was putting it on her father’s head: he emerged from the water like a Triton, hairy chested and dripping, Nenna a naiad beside him, laughing. They shook themselves, water flying off their thick curly hair, and pulled on their sandals to set off up the field. Tom dragged himself off the towel and followed them, muttering under his breath the names of all the delicious pastas which Susanna might have made: in bianco, con ragù, carbonara, all’amatriciana, all’arrabbiata, l’aglio e olio, alla puttanesca …

      They walked on up.

      ‘Come on, perfidious Albion!’ Aldo called back to him. Tom took off at a run, and overtook them at the gate, vaulting it: hands to rung two on the near side and rung one on the far, body horizontal, fly over – yes! He landed skidding on chamomile. The dusty scent of it erupted at his feet, and Nenna smiled. He walked up the hot white-dust road to the shade under the umbrella pines and the pale gigantic eucalyptus.

      Nadine wrote to Riley.

      Bracciano

      August 1929

      Dearest,

      The children are just in heaven, I think. This is an entirely new heaven. Nenna told us that Romans don’t like lakes, traditionally – because the Etruscans live there, so it’s all left over from Lars Porsena of Clusium swearing by the nine gods and so forth … but Aldo finds the seaside too busy, and has enough of it trying to drain it at work. This place is a kind of agricultural ruin, part of a farm belonging to some Roman princes who never come here. One of them, Don Alessio (?) is a bigwig on the Board of Drainage, and an admirer of Aldo’s work at the Agro Pontino, so when Aldo wanted to rent it Don Alessio said yes. It used to be a stable, and still has great stone troughs and iron mangers inside, but from outside it looks more like a tiny castle, with a tower full of pigeons, floors more or less of brick, and the roofs held up with wooden beams. The walls are speckled with lichen, greens and gold, and somewhere on top of the tower, rooks and bright blue sky. It’s a bit of a camp – water from the well, milk from the cows. Farther up the path live a bunch of lovely men in vests – Renzo, Roberto, Armando, Angelo – and their families, in small farmhouses. The men look after the cows and the women make vast vats of tomato sauce in a tiny stone house specially for the purpose. Barns and fields and vineyards recline in the golden sun on all sides; there’s a stream down the side where a Frog Orchestra quack and trill all night long.

      High up in the vaulted kitchen (so-called, there’s no stove and no sink; just a stone basin and a big fireplace) ceiling there’s an iron bar for hanging hams off so the rats can’t get them. The very first night, there was a bat hanging from it! Like a trapeze artist, or an acrobatic mouse. Tom made Nenna really laugh when he tried to explain to her why acro-bat was funny, in this context. She got the joke and he was so proud and happy.

      Sorry! Forgot to finish. It’s two days later. The lake itself is round in its volcanic crater like an egg in a mountain of flour (this is how you make pasta – I’ll explain when we try it at home) surrounded by boggy emerald meadows and Etruscan legends. A soldier made of solid gold lies asleep on the lake’s bed, silent in the deep water with nothing but eels for company. Last night little bats were flying in and out of the children’s bedroom window; livid green crickets cackle all night. I don’t know if it’s the same grasshoppers with scarlet underwings that fly across the meadows all day. Tom is looking it up. Kitty sits for hours damming the stream by moving stones and rocks, daydreaming and talking to herself, tying her wrists with strands of tiny pink and white striped bindweed, and not noticing when dragonflies land on her … Aldo loves this of course, and told her he does exactly the same at work. Sometimes he sits and joins in with her, pointing out the pitch of the land, and how water always takes the shortest course downhill. She got awfully bitten by mosquitoes, and one of the women here said ‘Sei tutta rovinata!’ – ‘You’re all ruined!’ She does look rather dreadful but they all say these aren’t the malaria kind and it’s the wrong time of year – So—

      ‘The dragonfly hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky’ – What song is that from? That lovely one – Vaughan Williams? Tom swims, all day if you let him. The rubber mask and snorkel for staring at fish is very popular. I think he might be beginning to entertain ideas of being a naturalist. There’s a little wooden dinghy; Aldo is teaching them to sail. Tom and Nenna are old enough to go out alone together; Kitty, much to her sorrow, just can’t swim well enough yet. Yes we’re taking our quinine!

      I will post this – I haven’t been to town yet so I haven’t had the chance. Day five or six now.

      Angelo and Renzo have taught them how to milk a cow! On a three-legged stool, with their cheeks resting against the great beast’s smelly side. The milk comes out warm and scary, and it tastes quite different to English milk. The rough-tongued calves with little nubs of horns on their curled brows come up and lick our hands; they sucked appallingly on Kitty’s fingers as if they were udders, and she thought they were going to pull them off. Even so she wants to be a dairymaid, or a cowgirl. There’s a gang of ugly lumpy-faced ducks who line up on a stone water trough by the cowshed which I’m certain must be an Etruscan

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