Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [100]
He wished he had said nothing to her in the car. Tomorrow was the funeral and after that he would return to Melbourne. Then it was all over.
He took a mouthful of beer. ‘It really doesn’t matter now.’
She was searching his face again, her eyes inquisitive and excited. She drew ravenously on her cigarette.
‘Your father was a fascist, wasn’t he?’
He banged the beer glass on the table. ‘That’s nonsense. Did Leo tell you that?’
Anna was not at all perturbed. ‘Yep. He said that your father supported Mussolini . . .’
‘My father did not support Mussolini!’ Saverio drew breath and looked out at the view. She was a child, she wasn’t to blame. ‘My father hated the Blackshirts, thought them thugs and criminals, but he respected some of what Mussolini was able to achieve for Italy and for poor people in Italy. He was not alone in that. Millions of Italian peasants were in agreement.’
‘He did beat your mother, though, didn’t he?’
And how the fuck is that your business? Saverio searched out to the horizon again. The sky and sea offered no assistance. The setting sun still had heat in it and he wished he had remembered his sunglasses.
‘I think Leo might have exaggerated some of what occurred.’ It was impossible to explain further. Yes, he had hit their mother, not very often, never bashed her, but yes, he hit her, three, possibly four times that he could recall, in front of him and Leo—smacks, slaps, always out of exasperation, driven almost senseless by her whining, her hypochondria, her almost bovine submissiveness. How to explain any of this to a young woman coming into adulthood at the dawn of this digital century? How to explain the behaviour of men and women from the end of a feudal millennium?
‘If he wasn’t so bad, why did Leo hate him so much?’
That question was so childish—as if there were any easy answers to it. Because Leo was unforgiving. Because Leo was stubborn. Because Leo was selfish. Because Leo relied upon their mother’s support and when she died he felt betrayed. Because mothers always favoured the gay son. All of this was true, but to say any of it was to lead into an argument. He wished she hadn’t come with him. He had wanted to forget Leo for a few hours, and her presence and her questions couldn’t help but remind him of the duties he faced tomorrow. He couldn’t do it, he just wasn’t up to it. He would say so to Julian, and Julian would understand. I can’t give a eulogy. I have nothing to say. I can’t say what I want to say. I can’t say that Leo was the kind of man who couldn’t go and visit his dying father, the kind of man who didn’t have it in him to ask after his niece and nephew. The rage seemed to flood through him, threatened to drown him. The heat, the humidity, the thickness of it, like a blanket over the world, was exhausting.
‘Are you okay?’ She was concerned now, biting her bottom lip. Her incisors were long and crooked. He wanted her to shut her mouth; the exposed teeth made her look crude, ugly.
‘I have to go to the bathroom.’
It was blissful to be inside the cool anteroom of the toilets. They were part of the original hotel and the thick tiled walls were effective insulation against the heat. He was the only occupant of the male toilets and he unbuttoned his shirt to the navel and splashed water on his face, his neck, under his arms. He used his handkerchief to wipe himself dry. He examined his face critically in the mirror. He hadn’t shaved that morning and across his chin and along his upper lip there had already formed a soft shadow of alternating white and black stubby bristles. He wished he’d had time for a haircut. His smoky-grey hair was shapeless, the harsh fluorescent light in the toilets seemed to shine directly above where his hair was thinnest. You idiot, he hissed to himself. You vain, stupid fuck, you want to impress that young girl.
The soft colourless scar above his left eyebrow was almost invisible. He should point that out to Anna. This is where my brother hit me with a hammer when I was ten. The reason for the argument was long forgotten. All he could remember