Chapter 35 Rafaella
Rafaella
This part of the port was like a warren, the streets so narrow that Rafaella’s hands could brush the walls on each side as she walked.
In the two years she had lived in Otranto, she had never been down here before – she’d never had occasion to come this far – and now she realized how very limited her experience of this town really was.
Without even noticing it, she had become a rich man’s wife and her world view had changed along with her address.
Every day she walked from her pretty villa to the school, or the market, or down to the water’s edge to choose the best fresh fish …
but that was only half the picture. The poverty here was far greater than the privations she had known in Tricase Porto.
There, their very smallness had insulated them: everyone looked after each other, sharing their catches and harvests when someone was down on their luck.
It was different in a big town. Scale dialled up the misery.
Patched and stained bedsheets flapped like flags on the washing lines above her head; stray cats slunk at every corner, bristling with fleas.
Women sat on crumbling steps with children on their laps, dull-eyed in the heat as they pressed themselves against the walls, seeking comfort in narrow, ever-shifting shadows.
Men stood around in their vests and trousers tied with string, playing cards, smoking cigarettes and worse things besides.
A cobbler had set up a rickety table outside his shop and was listlessly hammering tacks into the sole of a shoe. ‘Conte?’ she asked him.
He looked at her for a moment – taking in her strawberry linen dress, her gold cuff – and pointed to a house three doors down, as if too tired to talk.
The door was open, of course. No one had need of locks here. They all knew each other and there was nothing to steal.
‘Signora Conte?’ she called into a shadowy room. It was small but a square of light shone from the back window, alleviating some of the gloom. She peered around the door.
A woman was lying on a mattress, five children sitting on it around her. None of them was Nico, but one child – not more than three years old – was sitting on the woman’s legs. The whites of their eyes shone in the darkness as they blinked back at her like owls.
‘Signora Conte?’ she repeated, but her voice automatically contracted to a whisper as she came and stood by the patient, becoming aware of a rancid stench.
Oh God.
The woman was staring at the low ceiling, her gaze fixed, and Rafaella caught her breath as she waited, aware of the children watching her … Their mother was—
The woman blinked, the unexpectedness of it making Rafaella jump.
The woman’s face was glistening with a sheen that was at odds with the thick dustiness of the room, her breathing shallow and strangled.
Beside the mattress was a small tin pail quarter-filled with vomit, and Rafaella felt her own stomach turn.
‘I’ll get help!’ she said to the inert children, turning and running from the room, gulping for fresh air as she staggered back out into the street. ‘… Please, help me!’ she called out. ‘There’s a woman sick in there! She needs a doctor!’
Faces slowly turned but no one came running. It wasn’t the shock to them that it was to her.
‘Si,’ they nodded, turning away again.
‘Is there a doctor?’ she asked a woman who was cracking open some almonds into a bowl held together with staples.
‘No doctor,’ the woman said with a slow shake of her head.
‘Her husband, then? Where is he?’
‘Gone. Looking for work in Brindisi.’
Brindisi was over an hour away. ‘Where in Brindisi?’
The woman shrugged.
‘But the children …’ Rafaella panted, looking back at the contaminated dwelling. Without help, they would all fall ill, if they weren’t already. ‘I’ll … I’ll find someone. I’ll come back.’
The woman’s eyes moved slowly up and down her, like the cobbler, taking in the tailored linen sundress and her fashionable sunglasses too. ‘Mm.’
Rafaella gave a cry of despair that this woman didn’t believe her, running back down the street and around the corner. She would get her own doctor; he lived on the other side of the port, where the large villas of the old sea merchants were located, but she ran as fast as she could anyway.
The cobbles were shiny from ancient wear, from the unremitting sun, and her sandals had no grip. She felt her feet slip and threw her hands out on the ground as she fell forward, banging her knee hard. ‘Ow!’ she cried, on all fours. ‘Bastardo!’
Someone heard her curse and looked out from the open doorway opposite. A young priest.
‘Signorina,’ he said, rushing out to assist her as he saw her grip her knee. He gave her his hand to help her up and caught sight of her wedding ring. ‘Scuzi, signora. Are you OK?’
‘Si, si,’ she said quickly. ‘But I need help, please! I need a doctor urgently!’
‘You are ill?’
More people came to the door now.
‘Someone needs a doctor?’ asked a man with a stethoscope around his neck.
Rafaella cried out with relief. ‘Oh, thank heavens! There’s a woman in the next street.
She’s very ill and she’s got five small children with her …
’ He looked back at the room he was standing in, as if he had the same scenario in there too.
‘Please, please come with me!’ she begged. ‘I think she’s dying!’
At her words, the young priest and the doctor swapped looks. ‘I’ll get Father Caputo,’ the priest said, beginning to run up the street.
The doctor ducked back into the building and emerged a few seconds later carrying his bag. ‘Show me,’ he said.
Rafaella ran back down the street, leading him to the house, past the amazed looks of the almond woman and the cobbler. ‘… In there,’ she said, pointing to the dark doorway.
The doctor rushed in and Rafaella followed, picking up the two smallest children from the bed; they were like bags of bones. They protested weakly, like mewling kittens.
‘Shh,’ she shushed them gently. ‘Come with me while the doctor helps your mamma … Come, come.’ Slowly she herded them out towards the sunshine, where she could get a better look at them.
Their condition was startling. They were emaciated and filthy, with sunken eyes and skin filmed with sweat.
They all blinked, recoiling from the bright sunlight as if it burned them.
She tried to find shade on some steps, but the sun was high in the sky at this hour and what little there was offered no relief from the heat. A cockroach scuttled across the cobbles and over her sandalled feet as she began checking the children for signs of temperature, rashes …
‘There!’
She looked up and saw two priests rounding the corner. The younger one, who she saw now from his cassock was a seminarian, had brought, presumably, an ordained priest. He hastened inside with a stern look. He and the doctor were a tag team: one tasked with saving lives, the other with saving souls.
‘Thank heavens, I thought we’d lost you! We’ve been down all the wrong streets,’ the younger priest panted as he came over, his cheeks flushed. She wondered how he could bear the heat in his heavy robes. ‘How is she?’
‘I don’t know. The doctor’s still in there but I thought I should bring the children out here.’
‘You were right to do that … What can you tell us about her?’
‘Nothing beyond her name – Conte. I’ve never met her before. She’s the mother of one of my pupils.’
‘Pupils?’
‘I’m a teacher. I came by to get some schoolwork from him so he can graduate the year. I didn’t expect to walk into … a scene like that.’
‘No.’ The young priest’s gaze flickered over her, as the almond woman’s and cobbler’s had, and she realized just how out of place she looked here; in her head, she would always be an olive farmer’s daughter, but on the street all people saw was a rich man’s wife.
‘It’s a terrible thing what’s happening.
The doctor has been doing his best to contain this polio outbreak. ’
‘Polio?’
‘Yes. We’ve been going around trying to convince the residents to take up the vaccine but it’s difficult to win their trust. They’re naturally cautious of having a virus injected into them.’ He looked down at the children. ‘… How do they seem?’
‘Well, these two have a fever,’ she said, pressing her hand to their small clammy foreheads again. ‘And I think this little one is holding her head strangely.’
He nodded, looking at them more closely. ‘Fever and muscle stiffness can all be symptoms. It can take a few weeks for symptoms to appear and if their mother is very badly afflicted, then they’ll have been exposed.’ His concerned expression matched her own.
‘Oh God,’ she murmured, before catching herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Father.’
He smiled. ‘I’m not ordained yet. I’ll become a transitional deacon next year. I’m Brother Savelli, by the way.’
‘Signora Giannelli,’ she said back, trying to gather herself, but the enormity of the past quarter-hour was beginning to catch up with her. ‘This is all … it’s all so terrible. I had no idea there was a polio outbreak in the town.’
He nodded placidly but she knew what he was thinking: of course she didn’t! ‘It has been very bad,’ was all he said. ‘We’re doing what we can to assist the sick, but the hospital is overwhelmed and the children’s home is overflowing. We’re having to send them as far away as Lecce now.’
She looked back at him in dismay. Lecce?
‘Signora Giannelli?’
She heard the note of surprise in the voice as she saw Nico coming up the street.
He was carrying a hunk of bread and two pears she suspected had been harvested from a fruit tree in one of the grand gardens.
His body slumped at the sight of her holding his siblings with the young priest, as if she represented an endgame.
‘Nico!’ she gasped, relieved to see him at last. ‘Are you all right? I came looking for you and—’
‘Is it Mamma?’ His eyes were wide with fear. ‘… Is she dead?’
‘N-no, but, Nico, your mamma is very sick.’