The Night Falling by Webb Katherine

Author:Webb, Katherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

The sky is flat white as Federico drives them back out to the masseria; there’s a thick blanket of cloud that traps all the heat, and it’s so still and so stifling the air seems to have clotted. Seven magpies perch in the contorted branches of a dead olive tree, and they watch the car pass with eyes like lead shot, not even crouching to take wing. They have no fear, but also no energy, no animation. They look dead, and Ettore, still thinking of his mother, takes them as a warning of some kind. He’d been thinking how he would approach his uncle regarding the Manzos, how he would ask about Federico’s role in the squads, and whether Leandro is aware that Ettore, his own nephew, is on their hit list. Whether he knows that the well-fed young man driving them that day had, the day before, put a gun to his great-nephew’s head. If the magpies are a warning, they’re warning him against saying anything, but he’s not sure if he can heed it. Mustn’t his uncle choose blood over politics? Mustn’t he choose his own people over those who have persecuted them for countless generations? My brother has forgotten who he is; so said Ettore’s mother. Ettore holds his tongue and looks at Chiara’s husband instead.

Boyd Kingsley sits hunched in the front passenger seat, with his knees folded sharply and his head ducked down. He has a flat leather case cradled on his lap, and his fingers fiddle constantly with its buckles. He looks profoundly uncomfortable, but then, that seems to be how he always looks. Ettore can only see the side of his face – one slightly pendulous ear, a thin neck with rough skin like a plucked bird, wisps of colourless hair as fine as a child’s. He must be fifteen years older than his wife, at least. Ettore thinks of the way he engulfed Chiara in his arms when he first came to the farm, as if he hadn’t seen her for weeks, and it makes him slightly queasy. She’s his wife; of course he’s screwed her. He has every right, and Ettore has none. But once the thought of it is in his head he can’t get rid of it, and by the time they turn into the gates at dell’Arco, Ettore despises both men sitting in the front of the car equally; one rightly so, the other unfairly. He wonders if Chiara will come to see him with her husband in residence, and then curses his own stupidity. Of course she won’t. Perhaps she only used him in her husband’s absence, to flatter her, to fulfil her. Picked up and put down, like a toy. Whatever empathy he thought he sensed from her, whatever resonance there seemed to be between them, he might only have conjured out of grief and loneliness. Ettore’s jaw goes tight. The Masseria dell’Arco is not the real world, and neither is Chiara Kingsley.

Because he can’t say any of the things he wants to say, he says nothing.

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