PRAISE FOR LUCILLE BELLUCCI
THE SNAKE WOMAN OF IPANEMA
Bellucci’s skilled pen moves the story along adroitly, and this cross-cultural, paranormal gem will have fans of the genre rumbling through this tale of infidelity, trickery and revenge with the speed of a cross-country bullet train cursed with a hopelessly ramshackle set of brakes – and destined for a final stop that is delightfully impossible to predict. – the boox review
THE YEAR OF THE RAT
…excitement and suspense by matching the daily struggles in Shanghai with episodes of historical events in the rest of China. We sense the impending arrival of the communists and the unknown life which it may bring. Historical occurrences, little-known to us today, such as the attack on British ships as the communists cross the Yangtze to Nanking, loom large…. The Year of the Rat is an engrossing family tale - Barbara Sloane, Hills Newspapers
JOURNEY FROM SHANGHAI
By Lucille Bellucci
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Lucille Bellucci
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Introduction
The Italy depicted in Journey from Shanghai is what it was in 1952, seven years after the end of WWII. Lacking borders in common with other countries along both its long coastlines, isolated by war, Italians were unused to foreigners, particularly Asians, and demonstrated their curiousity with naivete and child-like fascination. Italians have since grown sophisticated, and, I might say, even jaded with foreigners.
PROLOGUE
1949
The Americans left. Rafaella Bardini’s best friend went away on an American warship which glided into the brown waters of Whangpo Harbor in the night. Twenty-four hours later, running without lights, the ship headed back for the mouth of the Harbor to the Yangtze River, and from there to the open sea. The sampans with their sleeping families barely rocked from her passing.
There had been no real farewell. Rafaella got a telephone call from Judy, who sounded nervous and muddled. “I’m leaving Shanghai,” she said. “On a ship. There’s no time and I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’ll write. ‘Bye.”
What ship? Maybe Judy meant she and her brother and parents were going into hiding somewhere. But when Rafaella heard that there actually had been an American ship, she knew she would never see Judy again.
Judy’s sudden, secret departure from the convent school that Rafaella also attended made the fear palpable. The nuns stopped talking about the Americans coming back, and hurried through textbooks and redoubled homework assignments. Time was short; it was precious.
Each day Rafaella struggled to convince her parents to let her out of the house.
“I can go around by Nanking Road. They said on the radio the police are keeping it clear and they’re sure to let me through when I show my pass. I just can’t miss another day. Exams are coming up and I’m not half prepared!”
It was her first year in high school. That was more important than even losing Judy.
Her mother often sided with her and many times insisted that her father escort Rafaella to school.
“What if there’s a blockade?” Mr. Bardini protested. “She’ll be trapped.” Rafaella’s safety obsessed him. He had a ruddy face with an emphatic nose; all color left his skin whenever he thought of something happening to her. She was too noticeable; these days it was not good to attract attention in the streets.
His wife usually had an answer. “Then she has to stay until she can come home. The sisters will care for her, and I have put a towel and toothbrush in her bookbag.” As long as the American nuns were staying until they were forced out, so would Rafaella.
As a Chinese female who had been allowed the privilege of learning to read and write although little more, Mai-yeen Bardini understood the value of an education.
It was worth sacrifice to save the money for tuition. In this winter of deadly cold, Mai-yeen had sent away the coal vendor because she did not have the price of twenty cattie-weight of his cheapest briquettes, which contained more sawdust and stones than coal.
He had said patiently, “I will come back next week, Mistress,” and then shouldered his bamboo pole balanced on each end with a basket of briquettes and swung away down Mayen Road. His bare feet in straw sandals were cracked from the cold and black with coal dust. The Bardinis could more easily live without heat than dispense with their amah. A servant maintained the shreds of their social station; Mai-yeen shopping for food without an amah in attendance would instantly expose their ruin to the neighborhood. A European man’s wife buying cabbages on her own? Times had indeed changed!
The lack of coal was insignificant. Bigger disasters threatened.
The fighting in the north pushed closer. Rumors caromed around the city: the American soldiers had pulled out of Chungking in the west; President Truman was sending a division to beat back the Communist insurgents; President Chiang Kai-shek had already given up and fled to Taiwan.
Stateless Europeans left over from old wars and new wars dithered, on edge. Russians who had escaped to China from the l9l7 Bolshevik Revolution either besieged foreign consulates for asylum, or waited apathetically for doomsday.
Chinese fleeing the inland provinces flooded Shanghai and begged on the streets for food.
Rafaella walked to school alert as a sentry. She guarded her pockets and bookbag, tightened her arms and elbows around them whenever someone bumped her. At least twice each day someone nearby on the street cried out and chased the thief but never caught him. There were simply too many places to hide, and no one ever helped.
Past Yenching Road, she dodged human beings more ruined than the clothes hanging from them. She stepped high over newspaper-wrapped bundles. Often tiny purple feet or hands protruded; sometimes dogs had been at the bundles. Rafaella learned not to look. So many infants were being strangled at birth because their mothers couldn’t feed them. It was a detail, like so many in China. If only she had money to ride in a rickshaw! In a rickshaw she wouldn’t look at anything but the clean sky. She could hold her breath long enough until they were quickly past the stinks of the sick and dead.
In class she recited, “The Magna Carta was the Great Charter of English liberties granted by King John in l2l5 under threat of civil war and reissued with alterations in l2l6, l2l7, and l225.”
Sister Maureen nodded encouragement, or as much as her head could nod inside the wimple pressing her ears flat against her head. She seemed to be the only person in the room who was listening. Patty Wong was staring out the window. Her father was an officer in the Nationalist Army and was reported missing. Annette Guyot, a Eurasian like Rafaella, doodled on the margin of her history book, probably daydreaming of her departure for France in a week. Who cared about what happened in England in l2l5? her attitude said.
Rafaella loved this old brick house—once a millionaire’s mansion—with its curving staircase and mahogany corkscrew balusters. The color reminded her of milk chocolate, which she loved and hadn’t tasted in at least a year. The oddest things reminded her of food; in chapel during Benediction the incense smelled like the sweet herbs roasted with chestnuts. If she were ever to get an allowance she would spend it on hot chestnuts every winter morning, one bag for each pocket of her red corduroy coat to keep her hands warm.
Like the other girls, she played volleyball with a passion none of them had felt last year. They burned off anxieties in fierce competition; no one cared much which team won. The court was two scabs in a lawn packed hard by hundreds of thundering feet. The old Soochow gardener had given up trying to save the grass, retreating to the rare peonies that he had planted for his former employer along the high wooden fence.
After volleyball the girls ate lunch inside a Quonset hut the American G.I.s had built for the nuns before they left China. Rafaella’s homemade sandwich usually was margarine scraped over grayish bread, with a little carrot jam on top.
Although Annette kept both her hands around her sandwich so that no one could see what was in it, Rafaella knew very well that she was eating the same spread as everyone else, unless it was worse, lard dripping with bits of pork rind. Annette disdained volleyball. She told everybody she was going to be a concert pianist.
“Please sign my book, Rafaella,” she said. She held out a notebook bound in imitation leather. “Say something nice to remember you by.”
Rafaella took the pencil and notebook and thought, then wrote, “Many curtain calls and flowers, and fame and fortune and dowers. From Rafaella Bardini.”
“It rhymes,” Annette said critically, “but what does dowers mean?”
“It’s a word like dowry, I think. So you’ll have no trouble finding a husband like poor girls did in the nineteenth century.”
Annette’s oval-shaped hazel eyes glanced coolly at Rafaella’s thighs sticking out of her old serge uniform. She liked to say that she looked more European than Rafaella, whose eyes and hair were dark. Both had fair skin, but Annette was afflicted with pimples, which Rafaella told her was certainly very European. “I’m not poor,” Annette said. “I have plenty of new clothes, and Papa will buy me more in France. I won’t be here to be raped and tortured by the Communist soldiers. When are you getting out?”
“I don’t know,” said Rafaella.
She could barely remember when money was not a problem. The war had destroyed the Bardinis’ country house and her father’s export-import business. His two freighters had been sunk. The town house had sold for one-tenth its value. Their last property was an apartment building; Mr. Bardini got not a single offer for it.
The building was crammed with refugee tenants. None paid rent, and none would leave. The Bardinis themselves were forced to live in a rented house. Their own landlord collected his rent and refused to fix the leaky roof of their small yellow house.
Daily news of imminent invasion drove Mai-yeen to the tiny garden, where she worked fitfully at planting flowers. She did not bother with a lawn. Grass, nurtured to the perfection she once took for granted, was a pretension for which she now had no patience.
One afternoon in late March, the amah announced, “Master Guido and his wife are here. I let them into the living room.” Her tone suggested she had set roaches loose in the house.
Mr. Bardini looked puzzled, but his wife was immediately mistrustful. “Boil water for tea,” she told Tsin-li. “But do not serve it until I tell you.
“They want something,” she said with certainty. “They have always come to us when they wanted something.”
“Don’t worry, Mai, the Vitellis couldn’t hurt us after what we’ve been through.”
When Mr. Bardini and his wife appeared in the living room, Guido jumped up from the sofa.
“Hello, old man.” He beamed as he met Mr. Bardini halfway and embraced him.
His Chinese wife, Lily, rose and pressed Mai-yeen’s hands. “It is good to see you, Mai. You look as young as ever. I’ve missed you very much.”
“Thank you.” Mai-yeen did not copy her effusiveness. “I see you are as fashionable as ever.”
The Vitellis’ well-being offended Mai-yeen. If her husband could not bring himself to do it, she would demand back the money loaned to them when Guido had had business troubles.
“Lily and I have been wanting to drop in for the longest time but you know how things have been. We’ve got good news for you, I hope. Do you still have that crazy apartment house and do you want to sell it?”
“Why yes.” Despite a gingerly reserve, Mr. Bardini could not conceal hope. “It is still for sale.”
I see, thought Mai-yeen. A commission is what they have come for. I can stomach doing business with them, but no more. She strove to hide her nervousness. A small sum would be enough to send Rafaella to safety.
“This is confidential,” Guido said. “A man I’ve done business with is buying up real estate. He doesn’t believe the commies are going to stay. When Chiang Kai-shek is back on top my friend is going to own most of the city.”
“I don’t see why it has to be confidential,” Mr. Bardini said. “We’re still a free society here until Shanghai is occupied.”
“Well, it’s obvious,” Guido replied. “If the new regime heard about it they’d shoot him. He doesn’t want his name used.”
“Has he made an offer?” Mai-yeen asked.
“Oh, certainly. It’s six thousand American dollars. Not much, I know. But I’ll try to get him to raise it. After all, I guess you understand we have an interest in this, too.”
Mr. Bardini sighed. “I paid the equivalent of fifteen thousand back in l942. But if we can get American dollars…. The cash is better than gold, I think. Do you agree, Mai?”
“Yes. Dollars in big bills will be easier to carry.” To forestall a more generous offer from her husband, she said, “Will you consider a five percent commission fair?”
“Of course, of course. Glad to have it. I’ll run over and see him right away so we can wind this up as soon as possible.”
“We’re grateful for this helping hand,” Lily murmured. Whenever she smiled she showed the vee shape of her upper teeth. “Old friends are best friends.”
Mai-yeen ignored the last remark. “Excuse me.” She rose and went into the kitchen. “You may serve the tea now, Tsin-li.”
That same evening Guido brought back three hundred dollars in earnest money and a power of attorney for Mr. Bardini to sign.
“He’ll go to six thousand five hundred dollars,” he reported jubilantly. “You’ll have the rest of the money day after tomorrow at the latest.”
Mr. Bardini handed him the deed. “What a relief to be rid of that place. Do you know I’ve even thought of tearing it down, with all the people inside?”
“My friend will take care of them.” Guido laughed. “He will have them wishing you still owned it. See you in a couple of days.”
When Guido did not return after four days had passed, Mai-yeen became restive.
Her husband tried to reassure her. “That much currency isn’t easy to get together nowadays.”
“I wish we had Guido’s telephone number.” The directory was out of date and the telephone people were unwilling to help. “Could we not send Tsin-li to their house with a note?”
“There is no need to worry, Mai, but if it will make you feel better, we can do that.”
Dismayed at having to travel miles across town, the amah grumbled, “Dinner will be late. And we are out of rice.”
“Leave it to me. Just please go,” Mai-yeen said.
It was dark outside when Tsin-li returned. The Bardinis were eating the omelet Mai-yeen had made.
“Mistress,” she said, her voice shaking. “Mistress.” Her chin dug into her chest; she plucked at the hem of her short tunic.
“Speak, Tsin-li.”
“I rang and rang the doorbell, then I banged on the door. And then I went next door and asked where Master Guido and his wife were and the man said…the man said…they packed up and left the city many days ago.” She began to weep and covered her mouth with her hand.
Mai-yeen only stared, though her lips moved without sound.
In the silence, Mr. Bardini said, “The power of attorney. I should not have signed it. He had, after all, brought three hundred dollars and I gave him the deed in good faith. In good faith,” he repeated.
Rafaella realized she was still holding her glass of water to her lips though she did not drink.
Her parents did not look at her or at each other. All three sat in a leaden stillness as Tsin-li clinked dishes in the kitchen.
“Of course you had to sign it, and you had no choice but to give him the deed,” her mother said listlessly.
“I am not feeling well. I have to lie down.” With quiet steps, he left the room.
We are trapped, Rafaella thought. The commies will arrest us and beat us and poke hot bamboo splinters under our fingernails and then they’ll put us against a wall and shoot us. Patty Wong’s brother died like that in the interior.
The people of Shanghai scrambled for survival.
A market in foreign marriages prospered. French, German, Belgian, American, British citizens received as much as five thousand American dollars for marrying someone without papers.
American consulate officials began destroying secret documents and registering the serial numbers of bundles of American currency, which they then burned.
On May 25th the People’s Liberation Army marched quietly, almost ambled, into Shanghai. Their demeanor was so meek and their officers so meticulous about paying for what they took that soon everyone was saying the Communists’ bad reputation had been nothing but Nationalist propaganda.
“Panic can cause fearful damage,” Mr. Bardini told his wife. “These people are not monsters after all, and once they reopen the ports I can start working again. China still needs her businessmen.” He invested the last of their money with a merchant friend who owned a food store.
Mai-yeen did not argue with him, but she took Rafaella out of school and enrolled her in a shorthand-typing course taught by an elderly British couple. For insurance, she hired a Chinese tutor, a hungry-looking widow, to teach Rafaella reading and writing Chinese.
Each day that Rafaella boarded a tram going in the opposite direction from the convent she felt she had lost something precious. Graduation was now forever out of reach.
A letter came from her friend Judy, every line a lament of homesickness and dislike of her new school in the Midwest.
The town was called Rydersville, and it was dull, dull, dull.
Rafaella wrote back, careful to avoid dangerous words such as regime and American, or that the streets all had new names. The post office had a new department of censorship, zealous cadres who took offense at nearly everything.
The strokes and hooks of Pitman’s shorthand seemed to make the only sense in her world. Her Chinese lessons were pure persecution. Written Chinese remained a mystery whether she studied one hour or ten. The colloquial Shanghai in which she had chattered and joked with her friends was no help at all.
She begged her mother to end the lessons.
“You must learn, Rafaella,” her mother said. “Your survival may depend upon it some day.”
“This will kill me sooner,” Rafaella said in despair.
Whenever she could she fled into books borrowed from a lending library owned by a White Russian who had once made a good living out of his library. He gave Rafaella the use of it for nothing. “Take, take,” he gasped, wheezing from chronic bronchitis and homemade vodka and tears for Mother Russia. “They are no use to me now.” Wildly, he tumbled books from his shelves into her arms.
Her face and the books attracted trouble. Both enraged the Chinese. Children and adults, seeing the foreign literature, screamed insults.
“Dirty leper! Your mother was a whore! Your mother and father are lice feeding on China! Our Great Leader Mao Tse-tung should exterminate vermin like you for being born!”
Head down, she walked steadily past the menacing fists. She did not tell her parents. She would endure rather than lose her books.
On her next visit, she tucked her small gold cross under her blouse and carried the books wrapped in a Chinese newspaper. But they knew her now. As she passed a small storefront on the old Tifeng Road, a stone flew out of the doorway. It struck her on the shoulder. She did not stop. Another stone glanced off an ankle. Footsteps scuffled behind, and more stones pelted her. The missiles were large and jagged, thrown hard enough to take out her eyes had she looked back. A blow on the head made her stagger. A second tore her scalp; she felt the blood flowing down her neck.
“Get out of China! You are not wanted! Foreigners have used our country too long! Go drown yourself in a well!”
Breathing hard but refusing to quicken her pace, Rafaella trudged on. She did not touch her wounds, not in front of her assailants. On the street corner she spied a uniformed cadre watching. He was smiling.
The number of executions inside the Shanghai Race Course and the Canidrome increased daily by hundreds, thousands, no one knew how many. Perhaps a million had been slaughtered, people whispered, while they made sure their children did not hear. The children now belonged to the People’s Republic and were its eyes and ears. How many had been executed in all of China? The streets were clean. Had the beggars been shot also?
On streets loudspeakers screeched martial songs—Arise, arise, workers, arise—all day and all night. The cadres nailed slotted boxes to lampposts and exhorted citizens to report anyone suspected of working against the People’s Government. The notes did not have to be signed. The Bardinis’ friend and neighbor, Mr. Chu, disappeared on his way home from work. And an old man who wrote letters for the illiterate. The neighborhood cadres denounced the two as spies.
Mr. Bardini visited the Italian consulate to ask for aid in repatriating to Italy. The consul said he had requested authorization and to be patient and wait.
For Rafaella’s sixteenth birthday her mother baked a cake with coarse flour, one egg, and a tablespoon of lard.
Another letter arrived from Judy. She loved Rydersville; she played the flute in the school band and was dating a senior built like Superman. Rafaella did not answer the letter.
1950
The first jumper chose the roof of the Grosvenor Hotel. He fell twenty stories and crushed a rickshaw coolie under himself. Most of the leaps afterward were clean. The ruined businessmen and landlords took nobody save themselves into death.
Halfway through her business course Rafaella’s instructors left Shanghai. Her shorthand speed had reached only eighty to ninety words per minute.
Her Chinese tutor told Mai-yeen, with shame, that she could no longer continue to give Rafaella lessons.
“I am so sorry that I cannot pay you more,” Mai-yeen said with equal embarrassment.
But it was not the fee. The widow was afraid to come to this household because of Mr. Bardini’s shortwave radio, which brought in the Voice of America and sometimes the BBC.
Reluctantly, Mr. Bardini dismantled his radio set and disposed of it, piece by piece, in various streets of the city.
1951
During the Chinese New Year (renamed Spring Festival) Mr. Bardini’s merchant friend was arrested for profiteering. With eleven other accused reactionaries, he knocked his forehead repeatedly upon the boards of the raised platform that now sat permanently in Worker Square. After all twelve had made public apologies to the people, they were taken to the Race Course and shot. The merchant’s shop was turned over to the cadres and became the People’s Collective Food Center.
Mr. Bardini again went to the Italian consulate.
In two years twenty-five pounds had vanished from his frame and he seemed shorter, especially when he forgot to stand erect. His cheeks looked as though he were sucking on them, but that was because he had lost many teeth as well as the twenty-five pounds. His one good suit had suede patches at the elbows; nothing could be done to hide the worn places at the seat and knees. Frequently he had chest pains but refused to see a doctor, whom they could not afford. Finally, Mai-yeen asked a neighbor to drop in to examine him. Angina, said the doctor, a German Jew who had not practiced medicine legally since he arrived in China in 1939. Get some nitroglycerin capsules. Try to rest, do not worry, he added, and laughed at himself for saying it.
Mr. Bardini returned home from the consulate buoyed by good news.
“The authorization has come! The Bevilacquas were there, and I saw old Mrs. Lombardi. The poor lady wept when she saw me. Forty years, she kept saying, forty years in China. She can’t bear to leave her husband buried here.” He held his wife’s hand in his own, which had new large, liver spots on the back. “At least we three will be together, we have that to be thankful for. We’ll have pictures taken for passports and exit visas, and then we’d better start packing.”
“Repatriate to Italy,” mused his wife. While he was at the consulate she had been worrying about that day, if it ever came. Compared to relocating in an alien land with no money, her past battles suddenly looked puny. “How will we live?” she asked.
“Why, I still have my contacts in America, remember? In Italy I should open my office in Rome or north, Milan, Genoa.” He was bright-eyed at the prospect of seeing Italy again.
“Matteo, we have no more capital. I do not mean to discourage you, but I have to know how we are going to go about settling in your country.”
“You’ll have to trust me, Mai. Of course it will be your country as well. I’m sure you will have no trouble adapting. As for capital, I’m going to write to relatives in Naples who may help. If they can’t lend us money, they’ll certainly let us stay with them until I can raise some.”
“Write, then, Matteo. And may your God help us.”
Rafaella felt some of her mother’s terror. She wondered if Guido Vitelli and his wife, wherever they had gone, were happy with the money they had stolen.
The Bardinis brought their photographs to the police station and applied for exit visas. The official they talked to was from the north, Russian-trained, contemptuous equally of foreigners and of Mai-yeen Bardini’s bound feet, symbols of the old China, of corruption, of partition and greedy rulers. China was unified now. After the first glance he did not look again at Rafaella. Eurasians were an abomination that China was finished with forever. “Come back in a month,” he said. “We have to check your records for political activities.”
“Political activities? We have never involved ourselves in anything political. I am a businessman, you see.” Mr. Bardini was careful to make his protest sound respectful.
“Next,” the official said curtly, and looked beyond the little group.
Next month the police were still investigating. The Bardinis were told to come back in another month.
January 1952
“As enemies of the State, and for their crimes of subversion, Matteo Bardini, the woman Huang Mai-yeen known as Mai-yeen Bardini, and the female Rafaella Bardini, are hereby exiled from the People’s Republic of China. They are to be gone within two weeks from this date.” The young cadre reading the document paused, taking his time.
He wants us to break down and cry and beg, thought Rafaella. What cruel, sharp eyes. He looks like a wolf.
The cadre’s drab blue cotton uniform was new, and he held his shoulders well back and the paper proudly high. His companion was older, middle-aged, and looked embarrassed.
The cadre resumed reading, glancing up at every other word, vigilant for signs of distress.
“Each person may take no more than one suitcase of clothing and fifty American dollars in currency. The currency may be purchased at the People’s Bank of the Revolution. Any person caught with more than fifty dollars in his possession will be punished by execution.” He tossed the document onto the dining table. “I would advise you to go to the station house at once for your exit visas. You cannot afford to delay.” He wheeled, and was gone through the half-open door. Following behind, his partner closed the door gently.
Mai-yeen said wearily, “For a year we had asked to leave and now they are exiling us.” She noticed her husband’s remote expression, his hand pressed flat against his chest. “Pains, Matteo?”
“They will pass.”
“We do not need two weeks,” she said. “We have almost nothing left.” She became defiant. “That creature did not say anything about jewelry. I am going to take my jade brooches.”
“Of course.”
“I am not selling them.”
“Certainly not, Mai. They are yours, from your parents. We have a right to take out a little personal jewelry. Pin them inside your clothes and trust they won’t search. How odd,” he murmured, as he gazed about the room. The walls had become sooty over the years without anyone noticing. “We’re leaving this place at last and forever. Well—” He had not sounded so brisk in years, “—it’s time to write my relatives in Naples.”
“Are you sure they will take us in?”
“Everything will be all right, Mai. You’ll see. My father was very close to his young cousin. We were almost the same age, and we went to the same school. Can you believe it, Mai. We are actually, really going to get out.”
Rafaella’s mother did not once turn to look back at their empty yellow house. She had wept in private and written brief notes to her family in Soochow. One entire afternoon she and Tsin-li stayed in the kitchen and talked about things Rafaella was too young to remember.
Poor Tsin-li had gone away yesterday to her son and daughter-in-law. The Bardinis gave her an even fourth of their cash and apologized for the small sum. “I had wished to retire you comfortably, Tsin-li,” Mai-yeen told her in grief.
“Bad times, Mistress, no one is to blame. I have the gold in my teeth for emergencies, but that I hope to save to pay for my funeral. Be careful where you go.” Tsin-li’s eyes had been red and swollen for days.
Rafaella stepped into one of the two pedicabs they had hired. Some of their neighbors had come out but none dared acknowledge the departing Bardinis.
She was finally going to see some of the outside world. Now she knew how a moth felt emerging from a cocoon.
In the streets of the city between dusk and dawn, trucks cruised. Soldiers caught males between the ages of fifteen and fifty and threw them into the trucks. The war in Korea was consuming recruits as fast as they were being sent.#
PART ONE
Chapter 1
1952
The cranky cargo liner Tripoli, bound for Naples, was not intended by her owners to be a pleasure cruiser. Rafaella hardly noticed its discomforts, for she had made her first friend in years. The coincidence of Stefano Chang’s parentage astonished her. She had never before met anyone else who had a Chinese mother and an Italian father like herself.
He was traveling alone. He explained his Chinese surname wryly: “The man ran off and left my mother and me without a legal chit between us.” The Italian consul had provided an Italian passport for him anyway, throwing in with it a short,
intense language course. As a result Stefano spoke a facile Italian, though he could not write a grammatical sentence.
They talked in English and to amuse her he sometimes faked an upper-crust accent (“Upper-lower-Middlesex”).
He was reticent about his mother, who had remained in Shanghai. Of his years in the Shanghai British School: “The other kids gave me equal treatment—the same as they treated the gardener.”
Stefano was twenty-one; the mature guardedness of his expression suggested thirty. He stood almost as tall as her father used to be (“I owe my height to the white race”), and was as fair-skinned as Rafaella, with faint freckles across the bridge of a nose melded of both Asia and Europe. The way he walked hinted of athletic skills. She found herself watching him when he wasn’t looking.
Mai-yeen had noticed Rafaella’s increasing attraction to Stefano.
“What is growing between the two of you, daughter?”
“Nothing, Mother. I just like him so much. And our coloring and Eurasian faces are so much alike. He is—me.”
“He is not you. You have been reading too many novels. Stefano is a sad young man, and a very cynical one. We will have our own worries when we arrive in Italy without the complication of your falling in love with Stefano Chang.”
“I’m not falling in love, Mother. He’s like the brother or sister I never had.”
“That is from another novel you have read.” She refrained from further criticism. Rafaella was still so young for eighteen. She had no experience with clothes, dances, or friendships with suitable boys her age.
On her tiny bound feet, Mai-yeen picked her way over the rusty, uneven deck. What a terrible ship. And there was Matteo’s health. The ship’s doctor had moved him to the tiny infirmary.
“I am feeling much better,” he said, when she entered.
His hand felt cold. She sat down on a white metal folding chair. “I can see you are.” She noted his bluish lips, the spongy ankles and the same tinge around his cuticles. Despair smote her breastbone. God, or the gods, truly abided within us, never in a compassionate heaven. Why else the human indifference? “Have you eaten, Matteo?”
“The steward has just taken away my tray. The toast was excellent, and so was the jam. Made in Italy. Marmellata di pesche.” To please him she repeated it, her tongue lamely hurdling the consonants. Grocers did not care what language a person spoke as long as the bills were paid. Knowing how to say marmellata di pesche was no assurance of anything.
“You may as well rest here as long as you can, so you will have your strength when we reach Naples,” she said.
“When do we dock, have you heard?”
“The captain has sent down a notice. If we meet with no delays in our stops, the voyage will last thirty-three days in all.” She delivered the news as though it were a routine weather report. They were halfway to Italy.
“Imagine, Mai, soon you will be surrounded by foreign devils.”
She pulled up the white cotton coverlet and tucked it around him. “I have had enough practice living with one for twenty-eight years,” she said tartly. “The balance changes sides, though. I will be the foreign devil in your country.”
“A small, sometimes quite fierce one.”
“Rest now.” Mai-yeen was tired of telling him to rest, of the futility of words. And what was the use of daydreaming of someone coming to their rescue? Their son had died at three of a tetanus infection. Lamentations were worthless.
On the fantail in the lee of the boat deck, Stefano said, “Smell that air, it’s different. We’ll be putting into Bombay soon.”
“Wish we could get off for a look.” She rebuked herself for whining. Nevertheless, she felt swindled. They were passing places she would probably never come by again, never know except what she could see from the deck of a ship. She was to be everlastingly poor, grow old counting pennies.
“It’ll be hot, humid, and packed with people, a lot like Singapore and Ceylon, which we didn’t see either.”
“And so will Karachi, Aden, and Port Said.”
“And Naples. Not warm in April, I expect, but very definitely on the other side of the world.” He stared down at the white wake that fell away and flattened over and over.
“Do you know what I kept thinking when we had to get off the train at every stop? When the soldiers stuck hooks in our shoulder paddings to see if we had something hidden in there? And when they stripped all the nuns right on the station platform in front of everybody?”
“Sister Maureen?”
“No. I thought when we got to Hong Kong and told people what it was like to be in Shanghai, something important would happen. You know, American soldiers, somebody doing something.” She burst out, “I wanted them to bomb China and kill all those crazy people.” She leaned her elbows on the rail and she, too, watched the wake froth into nothing. “But nobody seemed to care. No, that’s not true. At the border there was a priest on a motorcycle meeting all the refugees. He gave us cigarettes and chocolate bars. He had so many people to take care of. There was a foreign woman on a stretcher. She looked as if she was dying. Somebody said she was a missionary. It was raining, straight down on her face, hitting her eyes. She didn’t even blink.”
“And nobody from a newspaper even came to talk to you.”
“Not one person. I didn’t know we were old news.” The freckles on his nose, however faint, should have made him boyish but did not. Had he ever fallen down and cried when he was little? “Anyway, where will you go from Naples?”
“Rome, to the Salesians of Don Bosco. Not to become a priest,” he said, at her look of dismay. “It’s a youth hostel, some place to stay until I know what to do.”
“Are you going to look for your father?”
“If I knew where he was, I’d love to walk in on him.”
“Would you, really?”
“Not likely,” he said. “Not bloody likely.”
Coming toward them from around the poop companionway were Gunther and Anna. The two, brother and sister, had lost their parents in a bombing. Although they were German citizens, the Japanese had stuck them in an internment camp at Wu-hsing, near Shanghai, with the British, French, and Americans.
Gunther braced his large feet wide apart. Rafaella thought him awkwardly made, with a thick neck and smallish head, though his blue eyes were nice.
“So,” Gunther said. “We are becoming world travelers. But still the only country I know so far is China.”
“You better practice your German,” Anna said. “But I prefer American-English. Are there many Americans in Italy?” Her blue stare lodged upon Stefano. Most of her quests for information were directed at him. She showed no gratitude for his trouble, and all of her questions centered on Americans and how to get into America. Anna was pretty and graceful. She had begun to copy the hairstyle of one of the first-class passengers.
“Why do you bother with her?” Rafaella asked Stefano later. “She’s rude and she looks at you as if you were a doorpost.”
“As a Chinese, you mean?” Instead of being annoyed, he seemed to suppress amusement, his upper lip widening but not turning into a real smile.
“Yes, as a Chinese, then.” They understood each other. Europeans would have turned insincere, tactful: China was ancient, cultivated; weren’t Westerners still wearing rawhide when China had perfected porcelain?
Stefano answered, “I don’t know why I bother. I suppose it’s because we’re all the same, in the same boat.”
“True enough. But let’s say ‘ship.’ Gives more space between her and me.”
“She’s harmless, though.”
“So was Sister Maureen, I thought, but she slapped you
with a stick when you weren’t looking,” retorted Rafaella. “I’m going to see my father.”
She wondered if he was looking after her back as other men looked at Anna’s. The deck suddenly tilted, and she staggered and grabbed a railing just in time to keep from pitching onto her face. She found herself laughing. Now wasn’t that elegant?
The four of them watched six half-naked laborers on the dock put their backs against a huge crate and tip it into the ship’s cargo net. They stood directly below as the net was winched up.
“They’ll be killed if it slips and falls on them,” Rafaella commented.
“Six less mouths to feed.”
“Oh, Stefano.”
“He is right,” said Gunther sadly. “There are too many hungry mouths, and I am one of them.”
“Well, I am not,” Anna said, sharp with impatience.
Another refugee who shared their mess table called hello, and Rafaella gave him a small wave of the hand.
Anna said, “Getting friendly with him is not going to get you anywhere.”
“It is ordinary politeness,” Rafaella said coolly. “I am not trying to ‘get anywhere,’ as you seem to be all the time.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, princess. You are different from us, of course. Your father has a big estate in Italy.”
“Anna,” Gunther said.
“You don’t understand. None of you, except maybe Stefano.”
The Red Sea corridor narrowed, and they glided by Mecca to the east. At night, giant torches of burning gas flamed in the silent Arabian desert.
An inert heat enveloped the ship. On deck, metal scorched hands. Westerly winds laden with sand drove everyone inside the sweltering lounge.
Mai-yeen’s feet ached inside the bindings she was obliged to wear for support. At hours of the day when their two cabinmates were likely to stay out, Rafaella brought her basins of cool water in which to soak her feet. If anyone came in, shyly she dried and quickly slipped them under the bedcovers.
The inlet became almost a ditch, and the Tripoli entered the Suez Canal. They put into Port Said.
Two new passengers boarded the ship. Rafaella had never seen Caucasian men as coarse as these in her life. They looked mean and dangerous, their khaki pants tucked into broken desert boots, muscle and dirt flaunted with bullheaded swagger. As they passed her, one of them grinned and said something to his companion, who laughed. She flushed and went into the lounge.
The men worked their passage in the engine room and in the galley washing dishes. From her seat at the dining table Rafaella could see them through the serving pantry window, and hear them, too. They sang as they worked, despite shushing from the cook. The words reached her: maiden, breasts, and—abruptly silenced by the cook’s wooden spoon upon the singer’s head—fica, a word she didn’t know. The man caught her looking at him and popped his eyes slyly.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Stefano said later. “Ignore them like flyspecks.”
“So that’s what French Foreign Legionnaires are like.”
“Deserters, anyway. But they’re not French. They’re Italian. Paisani. Aren’t they a delight?”
“They’re horrible.”
“You aren’t the only one to think so. They’ve been leering at Anna and she doesn’t care for it either.”
“That’s because they have no money.”
Stefano pretended shock at the bit of spite. “Why, Miss Bardini, I am surprised at you.”
“I can’t help not liking her. And I still don’t know why you put up with her.”
“I told you why,” he said impatiently.
She saw his annoyance and suddenly felt tears imminent.
“Don’t forget to give me your Don Bosco address,” she blurted.
Miserable, terribly alert, she heard him stop a sigh.
“Here. Here it is.” He found a pencil and wrote it down.
She took the paper and put it in her pocket. “Thanks. Well, I have to go now. See you later,” she said, flipped her hand and blundered in the direction of the foredeck.
She took a fierce grip on the rail as if it were her own neck. She loathed herself. She had sounded juvenile, petulant, and had whined on about writing him in Rome instead of waiting for the last day to ask him casually for his address.
Men’s laughter. Two shapes, one on each side of her. Rafaella smelled sweat and dishwater and instantly forgot why she was here. A hand squeezed her breasts savagely, and she cried out. She turned to run and fell hard, tripped by an outthrust leg. Her skirt tore, was gone; a knee pinned her stomach to the deck. Weight dropped onto her back and fingers scored the skin of her buttocks and ripped away her panties. She screamed; one of her arms hit a face. The man cursed and kneed her again. Crying and kicking, she dimly felt the deck vibrating from running feet. Shouts mingled above her head; the weight left her back. She rolled over and lay sobbing while silhouettes tangled against the night sky. Blows cracked like wood splitting. Two more figures came running and lunged into the mass. She heard a solid thunk, and a yell.
She sat up, her head bowed upon her knees.
“Rafaella, is it you?” Someone lifted her. Her legs shook and buckled, and she fell against a thick chest.
“Are you all right?” Gunther asked, his arms hanging onto her around the waist.
“My skirt…give me my skirt.”
He lowered her to the deck and hunted, returning in a minute with the skirt, which he draped over her legs.
Kneeling beside her, Anna said in an ordinary tone, “I was just complaining to Gunther how dull it has been.”
“Did he…?” Gunther whispered.
“Wait,” Anna said.
Feebly, Rafaella plucked at her skirt and attempted to draw it up to her waist. Anna helped by pulling it up as Rafaella lifted her buttocks.
She drew a breath. “Nothing happened. I’m just scraped. That’s all.”
“Then everything is good,” Anna said. “Scrapes are nothing. They have taken the pigs away. A sailor beat them with a stick.”
“Thank you, Anna…Gunther.” She couldn’t stop crying or trembling. Those men had attacked like mortars hitting a field. Their hands were not flesh and bone, but metal.
“You should have seen them hit the pigs. And I kicked them and scratched their faces.” Anna’s voice exulted.
Rafaella got her feet under her and stood shakily. She had to pinch her skirt shut at the side where the button was lost.
“We were on the other side, and at first we could not say where the screams came from.” Gunther’s excitement was too explosive for the now-quiet deck. By golly, I would like to see them thrown overboard. Maybe they will be hanged! I am going to see what happens.” He marched off.
“I’m lucky you were around.” Random, powerful shudders still shook her.
“Nobody was near me at camp, not even Gunther.”
It took a few seconds for her to understand. Then she did. “It happened to you?”
“Many times,” Anna said calmly. “One of them gave me a disease also.”
“But who, which ones did it.” Confusion crossed with horror. “Your Japanese guards?”
“No.” Anna laughed. “Is that not funny? Not the guards. Some friendly people in the camp. What difference does it make?”
There was a difference, but the implications were too much to ponder now. “Didn’t Gunther try to stop them?”
“Ach, poor Gunther was too young, too small. They locked him in a room.”
“Anna.” She couldn’t think of anything useful to say.
“Can you walk now? You should wash the scrapes.”
A metallic clicking of heels neared. An officer materialized on the foredeck. “Miss Bardini. The captain is most sorry about the incident and has ordered that the men be severely punished. Will you accompany me to the hospital? The doctor will attend you there.”
“No! I mean, my father is ill in the hospital. I don’t want him to be upset.”
“You can come to my cabin,” Anna said. “I will make my roommates leave and the doctor can treat you there.”
Rafaella thought of her mother; but then, Anna had already done so. “Yes. Thank you, Anna.”
“Very well, Miss Bardini. I will escort you there, and then inform the doctor.” The white-uniformed officer saluted and fell behind them like an officious sheepdog.
“Remember this night,” Anna whispered. “It is the first time we have been saluted on this ship.”
This was somehow so funny that Rafaella had to fight down a giggle. Her belly quivered with fulminating laughter, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to hold it in.
As if she knew, Anna gripped her around the waist. “When we are in the cabin we will salute him back.”
This, too, hit Rafaella as terribly witty. She speeded up, dragging Anna along with her, because it was getting very difficult to keep the laughter from erupting. She imagined the scandalized expression on the officer’s face if he knew she was laughing, and bent over nearly double with her hands clutching her middle.
“A little bit more,” Anna said, hauling and being hauled.
In the cabin, after Anna had gotten rid of one woman by telling her all passengers were to assemble in the lounge for an announcement, Rafaella found she had to hold onto the sink for support. Her mirth was gone, and in its place was nausea. She examined the damage in the small mirror. One large round patch on her left cheek was scored pink, droplets of blood already congealed on its surface. Her lower lip was lopsided and swelling fast. Elbows, knees, and one foot were skinned. Pain beat from a dozen places.
When the doctor had finished and left, she was a patchwork of bright pink and tan skin. Tonight’s incident would be impossible to hide from her parents.
Anna said, “You could have made the doctor give you a room to yourself, you know. This was the captain’s fault. How can you make people understand if you are always so nice?”
“I know. I’m not smart, like you,” she said, meaning it; there was no sarcasm.
After a flash of suspicion, Anna relaxed. “I must say you are not. You can be sure I would have finished the voyage up there and even—” she angled her head, considering, “—at the captain’s table.” Out of her pocket she pulled Rafaella’s torn panties. “I was going to throw this overboard, but I thought it would fly to the stern and get caught on something.” She giggled. “Maybe on the head of a first-class passenger.”
Rafaella took it from her and balled it up in her hand. “I’ll flush it down the toilet.” She kissed her swiftly on the cheek, the downy complexion soft under her lips. “I’m glad we’re really, truly friends.”
In her cabin, her mother and their two roommates were already asleep. Without undressing, Rafaella slipped off her sandals and climbed stiffly to her upper berth. Despite her sore elbows it seemed less uncomfortable to lie flat. She turned her head and saw nothing outside the portholes to distinguish sea from sky. Maybe tonight was an initiation, a lesson of some sort to toughen her for the future she couldn’t see.
She closed her eyes, rocked by the mild pitch-and-slide, the unending faraway rumblings of the ship.
In the morning, to satisfy her mother that the damage had been superficial, Rafaella was forced to show every scratch on her body. Then she had to accompany her to the infirmary to prove to her father she was in good condition.
His pain, when he had seen and heard, hurt worse than her injuries.
“I brought this on you, Rafaella. If your father had been smarter, we wouldn’t even be on this sort of ship. I’m not much good to you and I’m sorry, really sorry I can’t…it’s really strange, you know,” he said. “Once I would have made the captain apologize to you personally and look at me…”
She could not bear for him to talk that way.
“He did already apologize, and he is coming to see you today, the first officer told me so. You tell him yourself what you think of letting gangsters loose around his ship. You’re going to report everything to the police in Naples, anyway, aren’t you?”
Her father closed his eyes and did not answer.
When she left the infirmary she asked a steward to deliver a note to the captain. If he did not visit the infirmary, she would invade his private quarters and demand it herself.
What if she had been raped? Would she have hated making love with a man forever after that? But if sex wasn’t pleasurable, why did she often wake up in the morning clinging to sexual dreams that never stayed with her long enough? The sensations of a man’s skin on her skin were so vivid that she carried them with her all the rest of the day. The man had no face she could remember. Many times he wasn’t even a body, merely a shadow, yet true as the shadow of a tree proved that there was a tree.
After breakfast, Gunther reported, “They are in leg chains in the engine room. The first officer took our statements and he will take yours today. He said the police will throw them into jail when we dock.” He stood straight in the cracking breeze, arms akimbo. A bandage covered the knuckles of his right hand.
“Pity I missed the battle,” remarked Stefano. “I’m the only one without a distinguished bruise.”
She was casual. “At last I have something the first-class passengers don’t.” This was better, much better than last night’s performance.
The fresh air exhilarated her and sharpened her perceptions of the tight group they made: the shirts on the two boys crisp against the blue-water backdrop; Anna’s round breasts lifting her homemade peasant blouse, her fashionable hairdo blown to all points. Stefano’s heavier dark hair flew in long, straight strands; Gunther’s whitish hair rippled down their stiff rows. Her own kept whipping over her eyes and she had to hold it down.
“Listen, everybody,” she said. “Let’s not ever lose touch with each other. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all meet in ten years for a party? Gunther and Anna, I don’t have your addresses.”
“We are going to an uncle in East Germany, near a town called Butzow,” Anna said. “He is our mother’s brother, and he lives on a farm.” She made a face.
“But you won’t stay long. I’m sure you’ll leave for the city when you’re ready.”
“Oh, yes. When I have learned to milk a cow, I will be ready for the city.” Gunther nodded around the circle, offering his joke.
“We can all write to Stefano,” Rafaella said. “It’s the only way to keep track of each other.”
Stefano looked at them all sourly. “Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do than play post office for a pack of misfits.”
She shrugged, her spirits undiminished. It was his way; she thought she understood him better now.
“Look!” Anna pointed over the side. A big dolphin, iridescent as an oil slick in the sun, leaped, fell back amongst the racing contours of its companions.
The ship’s horn bellowed. A series of blasts sundered the air. The girls made a show of cringing, hands over ears, then Stefano said, “Look,” very quietly. The group turned to where he pointed and stared, puzzled, at the low hump coming up to port.
“That must be Sicily,” he said. “The ship is entering the Straits of Messina. We aren’t far from Naples.”
Chapter 2
Rafaella Bardini
Gunther turned to wave to Rafaella, his thick arm making a folorn arc, before he followed Anna down the gangplank.
Rafaella truly faltered only with Stefano. He seemed so anxious to be off, a canvas duffel bag ready and hanging from his shoulder. It contained everything he owned, he told her, and better that way. He hated baggage and boxes; they dragged a person down. “Take care,” he said, and pecked her on the cheek.
“You, too.” She thought of her childish notion of a reunion. He was going…gone for good.
Customs inspection was cursory, the Bardinis attracting more attention than their minimal belongings. Although his presence was unnecessary, a second inspector drifted over, to stare at Rafaella with interest and at her mother’s feet with amazement. He brought folding chairs, for which Mr. Bardini thanked him in stately Italian. His sentences sounded alien, a locution half a century old, while the Neapolitans talked with a slurred rapidness embellished with gestures.
“If you will be so kind as to direct me to a telephone, I will contact my relatives in the city,” Mr. Bardini said.
“Use our office,” one man replied. He pointed to a door near the end of the shed.
“I have to call our relatives, my dear,” Mr. Bardini told his wife. He gave a measuring glance down the length of the shed.
Rafaella slipped her arm in his. “We’ll go together.”
Their return was slower, slow enough for her to watch the fluid uncertainties in her mother’s face fold, and lock.
“Your poor mother, how will I tell her?”
“She already knows, Daddy. She’ll understand.”
He paused to take a breath. “I’m a fool, Rafaella. Your father is a fool.” He sounded ready to weep.
“Don’t call yourself names. How could you know?”
“I knew,” he said. “But I didn’t want to.”
Mai-yeen Bardini continued to watched them come. “They do not want us,” she said flatly.
Her husband stood with his knees bent, unable to meet her eyes. He said softly, “My father’s cousin…his wife…they said they never received my letter…insisted they had never heard of any relatives in China. I couldn’t convince them with anything…names, dates…” He waited for someone to say something.
Mai-yeen said, “You must ask the official here what to do. Tell him our situation, they must have a social service in the city.”
“A social service for the destitute, you mean.”
“Yes. The destitute.” But she used the Chinese word meaning ‘straitened,’ not the harsh word of his choice. Even then it struck him so that he flinched and looked away from his wife.
“Mother,” Rafaella said, unable to bear her father’s humiliation.
Her mother turned on her. “Then you tell him.”
“No, Rafaella. It’s my….” He spoke to the customs man, “Sir, we are temporarily without funds. Perhaps you know of an organization that will provide lodgings for the night. It is possible the city of Naples has an hospice…?”
The man blinked several times as he listened. Her face felt hot; she bent over her purse pretending to rummage inside it.
“I see,” he said, his voice kind. Staring into her purse, Rafaella cringed. “Let me see what I can do.” He left them to go to his office.
In a few minutes the man returned. “I’m afraid the city hasn’t got much in the way of a social service, but I have tried something else. Some people will be here soon.” He excused himself and left them.
“A gentleman,” Mr. Bardini said. “We’ll be in good hands.”
I mustn’t mind, thought Rafaella. It was no use being embarrassed all the time; she needed to be alert. For all she knew they were going to spend the night here, in this huge space of naked steel beams and corrugated metal.
She buttoned her coat; she hadn’t felt cold in what seemed months.
Her father coughed. “My letter was dignified, not an appeal for charity. Only a short time, I said, then we would be off their hands.”
“I know what you wrote,” her mother said. “How could I warn you not to expect them to help?” She clasped her hands in her lap in a gesture Rafaella had seen many times. Endure and wait. What else is there to do?