Adam’s Breed

Teresa Boselli stood at the window staring down at Old Compton Street; at the greasy pavements, the greasy roadway, the carts, the intolerable slow-moving vans, those vans, that to Teresa’s agonized ears, seemed to rumble more loudly because of that window. There were men in the street, and women too, mothers⁠—yet they let those vans go on rumbling; they did not know, and even if they knew they would probably continue on their way uncaring.

Teresa’s whole being, soul, heart and brain, seemed to fuse itself together into something hard, resisting⁠—a shield, a wall, a barricade of steel wherewith to shut away those sounds. In the street below the traffic blocked itself; protesting horses shuffled and stamped, their drivers shouted to each other, laughing; a boy went by whistling a music-hall song; a dog, perched jauntily on a grocer’s cart, sprang up to bark at nothing in particular; and Teresa shook her clenched fists in the air, then let them drop stiffly to her sides. Her eyes, small, black and aggressively defiant, burnt with a kind of fury.

When he was four a splendid thing happened; Gian-Luca was given the freedom of the shop. It had been impossible to do other than accord it, short of tying up Gian-Luca’s legs, so Teresa threw open the door from the parlor and said: “Go⁠—but do not steal the pickles.”

This occurred one morning in July, when the warmth of the sun was busily engaged in coaxing out endless smells. The street door was also standing wide open, and through it came a series of rumblings and shoutings that expressed the spirit of Old Compton Street.

The shop! All his life Gian-Luca remembered those first impressions of the shop; the size of it, the smell of it, the dim, mysterious gloom of it⁠—a gloom from which strange objects would continually jump out and try to hit you in the face⁠—but above all the smell, that wonderful smell that belongs to the Salumeria. The shop smelt of sawdust and cheeses and pickles and olives and sausages and garlic; the shop smelt of oil and cans and Chianti and a little of split peas and lentils; the shop smelt of coffee and sour brown bread and very faintly of vanilla; the shop smelt of people, of Fabio’s boot blacking, and of all the boots that went in and out unblacked; it also smelt of Old Compton Street, a dusty, adventurous smell.

Nonna was not in the shop on his return, she happened to be knitting in the parlor. He approached her very slowly with the offering extended; his face was rather red and his breath came rather fast. Nonna looked up.

“For you!” said Gian-Luca. “I bought them myself⁠—”

And he waited.

“Thank you,” said Nonna. “What very pretty flowers⁠—it was kind of Gian-Luca to buy them.” But she did not even smell them, she put them on the table and quietly returned to her knitting.

Still he waited. Nothing happened, nothing was going to happen, no rapture, no expressions of delighted gratitude, no clasping, and no kissing of himself. There lay the fading flowers, and there sat Nonna, knitting, and there stood Gian-Luca, always waiting⁠ ⁠… Then suddenly he broke, something went snap inside him. He looked about him wildly for what he might destroy. His eyes came back to Nonna, to her long brown hands, her knitting, the thing that she preferred before his flowers. His arm shot out, he seized it and tore it from her hands; he hurled it to the floor and stamped upon it: “Bestia!” he choked, as though the thing had ears. It parted from its needles and unraveled as he stamped; at the sight of this his fury increased beyond control, and hurling himself down he tore and bit the wool, like a small wild beast that worries at a victim.

Teresa sat very still; her empty hands were folded, they did not strike, nor did they rescue. When she spoke she did so gently, and quite without emotion:

“Gian-Luca, you will go at once to bed.”

He looked up at her: “I hate you! You do not love my flowers⁠—you do not kiss me, not ever⁠—”

“You may take away your flowers, I do not want them now,” she told him. “I find you a very naughty child.”

They had had to abandon serving suppers at the Capo after a fortnight’s trial. The Padrone was too experienced a slave-driver not to be able to gauge with some niceness the limits of endurance of his slaves. At half-past ten or a little after, the waiters found themselves free, and Mario, Gian-Luca, and the still cheerful Schmidt were jostled together in a last frantic effort to get out of and into their clothes. Mario appeared to have wilted again, his round face looked weary and drawn; from time to time he would glance through the door as though expecting something to happen. And it happened quite soon; downstairs came the Padrone, they could hear him talking to himself⁠—he was muttering fiercely under his breath.

“He works himself up,” thought Gian-Luca.

The Padrone stood still in the doorway for a moment with his soft brown eyes fixed on Mario; then he opened his mouth and began to shout. All the while he was shouting his eyes remained gentle⁠—dove’s eyes in the face of a tiger. One by one he checked off the mistakes of the day, beginning with the horror of the salad:

“Scemo! Imbecille! Sporcaccione!” he shouted. “How long am I going to endure you! You limp round my place like an old lame mule; no one else would engage you; very well you know that! If you did not come cheap, I myself would dismiss you; you bring shame on my Capo di Monte.”

Two days later Geppe received the order to rejoin his regiment at once. He sat staring helplessly down at the paper where it lay on the breakfast-table. Through his poor, shrinking mind surged a chaos of ideas. He would tell them all that he dared not go; he would rush to the docks and get aboard a ship bound for some neutral port; he would fling himself on his grandfather’s mercy and beg and implore him to hide him; he would cling to his mother and surely she would help him, perhaps if he cried she would find a way to help him as she had done when he was little; he would go to the chemist and buy enough strychnine; he could say that it was needed to kill a wounded cat⁠—anything, anything, anything but war! He had heard of the sort of things that happened in war on his journey home through France. That little, innocent bit of paper, how could it mean so much? If he tore it to pieces that would not help him, for the thing was possessed of life everlasting; destroy it and there was its damnable spirit waiting to drive and hound him. No good, no good, he must make a clean breast, he must speak now, revealing his shame, he must say to them all: “For Christ’s sake, help me! I am sick with the fear of going.”