Chapter 29 Elena
E LENA
It’s freezing on the water at night. Even with the heavy layers of clothing Elena has on and Christian’s arm around her, the cold rips right through to her bones as the vaporetto leaves San Marco for San Marcuola, where Mamma waits for them.
Christian’s talking animatedly about the performance artist they saw earlier standing in the tank of water. He shows her the Twitter feed on his phone. ‘This exhibition’s going off. “Affogando”’s trending, look.’
His ability to dissociate from the fact it was her refusal to go look at the art a few nights ago that led to her begging for her life confounds her.
She pretends to listen to him tell her more about Venice Rising , while she plans her escape. It will have to be done without Mamma having received her letter, which makes it more difficult but not impossible. Hopefully God is on her side and Mamma will be home when she needs her to be.
She needs to send Christian off exploring without her so she can take the boat to Mamma’s apartment. Together, they’ll race to the train station nearby and catch whichever train is leaving Venice first. They’ll find somewhere temporary to stay, change the colour of their hair, and begin a new life. She can’t think about anything that comes after that. It’s too much, too terrifying. One step at a time.
At least here in Italy, it will be harder for him to find her. He has no agency here, no multimillionaire father – director of a mining company – and all his Sydney contacts. But although it will be harder for Christian to find her in Italy, it won’t be impossible. He’ll be wild with fury. He won’t simply let her go without a fight. He can afford private investigators to track her down. Her heart rate speeds up.
‘Look at this, Ellie. This is the other installation I was telling you about, the Jesus one the Catholic Church is going nuts over. Check out the retweets. I’m telling you, this thing’s getting traction.’
‘Mmm, sounds like it.’
She has to make sure they leave no trail when they escape. She can’t afford any mistakes. They’ll have to stay absolutely hidden for a few months at least, until he returns to Australia having exhausted all options and having given up on ever finding her. He’ll go home eventually; his career will lead him back to Sydney in the end. She’s banking on him leaving Italy before she and Mamma run out of money.
If he doesn’t give up, if he decides to stay in Italy, he’ll find her eventually, this much is certain.
A shiver runs down her spine. She looks out over the black water, seeing nothing.
How did she get here? How did this become her life? She, Elena Zanetti, who was clever enough to win a prestigious scholarship from the University of Bologna for an exchange program with the University of Sydney. She, who had the independence and smarts to move alone to the other side of the world at eighteen and to graduate Law, in a foreign language, with distinction.
She was so desperate to hang on to her life of freedom in Australia, to stay far away from her grieving parents back in Venice, that when her student visa expired, she gratefully accepted the marriage proposal of the lovely doctor she’d been dating for less than a year.
Christian had been so easy to fall in love with. Hot, popular, ambitious – he was the whole package, even without his ostentatious wealth. He doted on her, besotted by her Italian accent and her olive skin. She loved being loved by someone like him.
Only six weeks after the wedding, while she was preparing for the bar exam, she found out she was pregnant.
Christian was overjoyed at the news. She wanted to die.
She was so ill with morning sickness, she could barely leave her bed, let alone study. There was no way she could take the exam in that condition. She had no choice but to wait for the next opportunity in a year.
In the early stages of her pregnancy, the only food that didn’t make her sick was deep-fried. And while she couldn’t drink water without gagging, she was somehow able to chug down litres of Diet Coke. It wasn’t exactly an optimal diet, but she did what she had to do to get by.
As the weeks went on, she grew more and more resentful of the situation she was in.
‘Did you have a good day?’ Christian kissed her cheek one evening, walking in from yet another late night of hospital rounds.
‘Best day ever,’ Elena snapped.
‘Why are you being snarky?’ He flopped down onto the leather couch next to her in their apartment overlooking the harbour, which still didn’t feel like home to her, and yawned. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens! I spend all day every day lying here feeling sick or hunched over the toilet vomiting because I’m carrying your child. That’s my whole life now.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘My child? Our child, Ellie.’
‘I didn’t want this.’ She waved at her still-flat abdomen. ‘I’m only twenty-three, for fuck’s sake. Do you think I studied as hard as I did to end up like this?’
‘Hey, calm down, babe,’ he said gently. ‘This wasn’t the plan, I know, but it’ll all work out. It’s okay.’
‘It’s not okay, nothing’s okay! I’m losing my fucking mind!’ Elena was annoyed at how shrill she sounded. ‘My friends have forgotten about me. They all have careers now, and what do I have? Nothing! No job, no family. You’re never home. And whenever you are home, you’re buried under textbooks. I feel like a widow most of the time. Nobody calls me, nobody visits. I’m rotting away. This fucking baby’s ruined my life.’
Christian gave her a look, and for a brief moment she had an unexpected knot of fear in her stomach and the wild notion that he might hit her. Then he pulled her in closer to him and kissed the top of her head.
‘I’m so sorry things are shit for you, Ellie,’ he murmured. ‘It’ll get better soon. You won’t be sick for much longer, and then everything won’t feel as bad as does it now. I wish I was around more. This post grad is killing me, babe, but it’ll be worth it. Once I’m a consultant I’ll make the best life for you and our family, I promise.’ He stroked her dirty hair.
Elena convinced herself that she must have imagined the dangerous look in his eyes.
She was sixteen weeks along when she felt the baby kick for the first time, tiny butterfly tickles, so precious they brought tears to her eyes. In that moment, she had her first outpouring of love for her child. ‘Hello, little one,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so sad. I’ll try to be better.’
Two days later, she miscarried.
‘Did you do it deliberately?’ Christian asked her on the way home from the hospital, in a tone she’d never heard before that made the hair on her arms stand on end. ‘You didn’t want the baby, you made that pretty clear. Did you do it deliberately?’ His lips formed a thin line.
Her eyes just about popped out of her head. ‘ What? ’
He didn’t reply. He stared straight ahead for the rest of the drive, which they passed in silence. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
They both remained silent as the lift ascended the eight floors to their apartment. As soon as they were inside, she pushed past him and pulled her phone out of her handbag to call Mamma, to cry to someone who would comfort her for what she’d just been through rather than accuse her of orchestrating it.
She screamed when Christian sent the phone flying out of her hand.
‘I’m going to ask you again,’ he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. ‘Did you do it deliberately?’
She stared at him like she was seeing him for the first time. Who was this person? ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted, bending down to pick up the phone and showing him the shattered screen. ‘Look what you did! What the fuck is wrong with you?’
He swung his arm back and punched her in the face with a force that sent her flying onto the hard floorboards. Then he squatted down next to her and grabbed a chunk of her hair, jerking her neck back in one swift motion.
His lips were on her ear. ‘You’re a disgusting pig.’ He spoke slowly and softly. ‘You’ve done nothing but stuff your face full of fried shit for weeks. You may as well have been feeding my baby rocket fuel with the amount of Coke you guzzled every day. You killed my child by rubbishing your body, you stupid bitch. And now you fucking owe me another one.’ He rammed his knee into her stomach and she retched.
He left her like that, curled up on the floor in her own vomit, and took himself off for a walk. Elena was in a fog, aching from the miscarriage, from the beating, bewildered, terrified, too shocked to call anyone – her parents, his parents, the police. The shame of her husband beating her only hours after she’d endured a D&C kept her there, hugging her knees on the floor.
Now, as the esplanade lights of San Marcuola come into view, she judges herself for not having left him then and there. She could have left and caught the first flight home to Venice that very first day he hit her.
Instead, he came home an hour or so later, his face crumpling with regret. ‘Ellie, I don’t know what happened. I was beside myself, I wasn’t thinking straight. I can’t believe I hurt you. Jesus Christ! I’ll never hurt you again as long as I live, I promise.’
He was so warm, so caring towards her in the weeks that followed, so completely back to his lovely self, that she forgave him without having to try too hard.
The next time he beat her was six months later when she spoke to him in a tone he didn’t like. Again, she didn’t tell anyone. Again, she didn’t leave him. She knew then that she’d made the biggest mistake of her life in choosing him. It was the start of her crippling self-doubt. She was always told how smart she was, but how smart was she really? Look who she’d married.
When he cried and apologised and made promises all over again, she chose to believe him so that she didn’t have to face the truth, that she was an idiot who’d been tricked by a monster.
When the next intake for the bar exam came around, it was impossible for her to apply. By then, they’d moved away from the city, closer to Christian’s new placement at an outer suburban hospital. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house without him. He took away her phone and made her close her bank account.
Elena never worked a day as a lawyer. From the day she married Christian, she never worked a day as anything. Her friends had long given up on her. She was all alone.
Now, she thinks, the most confusing part is that she still can’t work out how she let it go so wrong. What she knows is that it didn’t all happen at once – it was a gradual thing, a slow robbing of her life. Somewhere along the way she lost herself, and she believed him when he told her that she was worthless, stupid, completely dependent on him for survival.
Her job, Christian reminded her, was to get pregnant. But she wasn’t able to conceive. He accused her of secretly being on the pill. She wasn’t.
He threatened her that if she ever left, he’d kill her. ‘Don’t even think about running away,’ he warned her. ‘Believe me, I’ll find you. And if you run back to Mummy and Daddy in Venice, I’ll kill them too.’
She believed him. She never attempted to escape. Not once. Even when he began controlling her food intake in his mission to make her womb ‘less toxic’, and she lost more and more weight.
Christian remained his loving, charming self between the episodes of horror, which came on with increasing regularity as the years passed. The violence that began as a few times a year became a few times a month, then more.
The longer she didn’t conceive, the more fixated he became with controlling her body through food. It was as if he genuinely couldn’t see her fading away.
When the cancer came for Papà and he grew gravely ill, as much as she begged and cried, Christian absolutely would not allow her to go back to Venice on her own until his exams were over. Along with the tidal wave of regret came a blinding anger. The death of her beloved Papà finally lifted the fog.
‘Here, babe.’ Christian holds his hand out for her as the vaporetto comes to a slow stop and the passengers disembark at San Marcuola. ‘Careful, the ground’s wet,’ he says, ever the gentleman, always looking out for her.