They were on the heels of the retreating Germans, and charged with reporting back on the state of the transportation routes to the north. They were proud to serve the Allies, but they resented not being able to enlist as regular, real soldiers. Especially Roosevelt, who was baffled not to be considered by the British as at least half American. Vitantonio would have preferred to take the roads closer to the coast, to pass Bellorotondo, because in three years he had returned there only once: to watch his nonna’s burial. But their mission forced them to take the inland road towards Grassano, which lay about halfway to Potenza.
The first two days of the journey saw them storm ahead to Potenza, where there was no trace of the Germans; but when Lieutenant Donovan’s men reached Rionero in Vulture, to the north, they sensed the sinister trail of repression from a distance: the screams and wails of women echoed through the surrounding mountains and rippled through the outskirts of the town. The entire population was in mourning. The Germans had just executed eighteen innocent local men.
The town had been starving for weeks. Only eight days earlier, a group of desperate peasants had broken into a warehouse. The attackers’ weak, skeletal appearance so horrified one German soldier that he took pity on them and helped a woman carry off a sack of flour. The next day, his superior officers had him shot.
During those days of hardship, in the regions of Basilicata and Puglia, there were some Italian fascists who managed to earn themselves an even worse reputation than the Germans. Instead of just trying to control the locals, they chose to make survival even more difficult for the poorest, neediest Italians. In Rionero, it was the attempted theft by an Italian commando that set off the punishment executions. A young girl found him in the henhouse and alerted her family. Her father shot the thief in one hand. The Italian soldier and his unit demanded revenge and the Germans decided to compensate him for his wound by killing the father and seventeen other innocent men chosen from among the town’s young people. Many of those executed were soldiers who had returned home from the front just hours earlier, having taken advantage of the fact that many of their commanders had abandoned their posts after the signing of the armistice in early September. They had travelled for days to get home.
When, on 25 September, the Englishman, Vitantonio, Roosevelt and the Professor reached Rionero, the eighteen men had been shot less than twenty-four hours earlier; the women were still watching over their bodies. The whole town was deeply resentful of the local Italian soldiers. Many had begged the commandos to intervene before the executions, but they had denied their requests for clemency.
‘In the name of Il Duce, there will be no pardon!’ they had shouted as their only response.
The townspeople were particularly enraged with two fascist civilians who had urged the Italian and German soldiers on to even greater cruelty. The women who had seen them haranguing the soldiers trembled in fear to remember the scene. The only description they gave was that there were two of them: a tall, hulking man with rotten teeth, and a young man dressed all in black.
As they made their way further north, Vitantonio and his friends came across yet more episodes of gratuitous violence by the Germans, accompanied each time by the enthusiastic collaboration of a few Italian soldiers who remained faithful to their former allies. And soon they discovered that the worst massacres always coincided with the sinister trail of the two strangers who had encouraged the Germans’ revenge killings in Matera and Rionero. Their reputation preceded them. Throughout the region, people grew to fear the two fascists as much as the Germans.
When, two days later, the Englishman and his men arrived in Ascoli Satriano, they exchanged the first direct gunfire with the enemy rearguard. Perched up on a hill, a small group of German stragglers were firing a mortar against the helpless townspeople. By the time the Englishman and his band ran them off it was already too late: the shelling had killed ten civilians.
‘We’ve been rationing food for days, because we barely have any left,’ the locals told them. ‘When we saw they were planning to loot our homes and barns, we stood up to them and the Germans went mad. Two Italians with them egged them on to retaliate with the mortar gun.’
Donovan’s group dropped to the ground, exhausted, with their backs resting against the wall of the first house in town. Vitantonio sat alone across the street, facing the others. On the house’s façade, a bit above the line of shadow cast by his friends, someone had written: ‘Long live Badoglio and long live the king.’ He spat on the ground. It sickened him that they were too late again to save the town’s civilians; he felt an intense hatred for those responsible for these massacres. And he felt a strong need to come face to face with them and kill them.
In Ascoli, the survivors were better able to identify them. ‘They’re two bastards from right around here. From the Mezzogiorno, probably Bari or the Itria valley. One of them is a damn giant, with black teeth rotted away from the venom that runs through his veins. The other is even worse: cruel, heartless. And he acts like it’s all a game: he dresses in black from head to toe and calls himself the Black Knight.’
Vitantonio heard the name and felt as if he’d just been punched hard in the stomach. He tried to convince himself that this couldn’t be, but he couldn’t deny that he’d had his suspicions for a while now. He leaned back against a drystone wall and had a vivid flashback to the palazzo garden on the afternoon of his confirmation.
‘Will you teach me how to fight?’ Franco had asked him.
‘What’s got into you? You can’t teach fighting. When you’re in the right, you fight and that’s it,’ he’d answered.
Shortly after that they had started playing with the wooden swords Skinny had made for them at the factory. Brandishing his, Vitantonio had donned a white sheet as a cloak and declared, ‘I’m Knight Frederic de Castel del Monte, about to set off for the Crusades.’
‘I’m the Black Knight. If I win, your people will die by the sword and by fire,’ Franco had replied, wearing Nonna’s black shawl as his cape.
That night Vitantonio couldn’t sleep. He tried to conjure up memories of carefree games and innocent adventures with Franco and Giovanna, but different ones kept rising to the surface, reminding him that he was the only one who had refused to accept a truth that all the others knew and had tried to make him see. He travelled back in his mind’s eye to a day in Bari in 1936 when he skipped class and went down to the port to say goodbye to Giocavazzo, who was heading to the war in Ethiopia.
He had found his friend smoking, his right boot resting on a bollard at the foot of the gangway. They hugged and his former school rival joked with him. ‘You sure you don’t want to come with us? You’re really missing out … There’s nothing to do here, this land is pure misery.’
‘There’s nothing for me anywhere else. Besides, you think you’ll even get there in time? They say the war’s almost over.’
‘We’ll land in late April, just in time for the final assault on Addis Ababa. We’ll enter the capital and there’ll be a victory parade. You’re going to miss it. It’s a shame: you’d look good in the photos they’ll be publishing in every newspaper in Italy to commemorate our success. I still don’t understand how the bravest, strongest guy in the class wants to end up as a lawyer for the poor in Puglia, and the biggest coward, your thick cousin, is dying to be a blackshirt.’
Vitantonio looked at him in surprise.
‘Didn’t he tell you? He’s joined the Volunteer Militia. They go through towns burning down dissident meeting places and beating up anti-fascists. In the countryside between Bari and Foggia they’ve already burnt down one house and two Party of Italian Peasants’ headquarters.’
‘I thought that stuff was a thing of the past.’
‘The Fascist Party might not encourage it any more, but they still do it under their own steam. When he’s in a group and feeling confident, your cousin is the most aggressive of them all, but when it’s time to fight he’s a little shit. Most of his fellow militia men have volunt
eered like me and are already in Ethiopia, but he bottled it.’
Giocavazzo lit another cigarette, looked him right in the eye and decided it was time to get a few things off his chest.
‘I don’t know how you can look so surprised. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that he was the one who ratted on Salvatore and got him beaten up …’
Vitantonio didn’t wait around for the ship to set sail. He shook his friend’s hand and left the port as quickly as possible. The next day was Saturday and he went up to Bellorotondo. He reached the palazzo around lunchtime and found Giovanna and Franco in the garden, arguing. He was trying to put his arm around her shoulder. When she saw her twin brother come in, the relief showed in her face.
‘Get this idiot off me. I can’t stand him any more,’ she begged as she embraced Vitantonio.
Brushing his sister aside, Vitantonio walked straight up to Franco. He grabbed him by the arm and pushed him into a corner, behind Nonna’s azaleas. He pinned him against the wall.
‘I won’t repeat this. As far as I’m concerned, you can act like a big man with your blackshirt friends all you want, as long as you do it far from Bellorotondo. In Naples, Rome or wherever you please but, from now on, stay away from here. Have you heard about the exile your kind is imposing on dissident intellectuals? Well, now it’s you who is exiled from Puglia, because if you aren’t gone by next month, I’ll tell the Vicinos that it was you who informed on Salvatore. And you know that he has a lot of relatives in the mountains who are capable of anything.’
Franco turned white and tried to justify himself. ‘You don’t understand. Salvatore’s no good for Giovanna. He’s filling her head with all sorts of ideas. I’ve already had to defend her several times. She’s not escaped the blackshirts’ notice and I know people who want to do her harm.’
Vitantonio’s anger flared and he slammed Franco against the stone wall again.
‘If any of your friends touch her, I’ll kill you!’
‘I’ll protect her, I swear! I just want her to stop seeing Salvatore. She deserves what I have to offer her.’
‘You’re insane!’ he shouted. ‘I know you really like Giovanna … but for God’s sake, she can’t stand you and besides, she’s your cousin; you’d need a special dispensation from Rome to marry her.’
Vitantonio asked himself if it was confusion or anger that he was feeling, and he decided that, mostly, he despised his cousin and that this time he wasn’t willing to forgive him.
‘I’d hoped you would stick up for yourself, say there’d been a misunderstanding and deny everything.’ He looked at Franco scornfully and spat on the ground. ‘You have until the end of the month,’ he concluded.
Vitantonio watched Franco leave with his tail between his legs, and wondered if perhaps his cousin had just been trying to act the man in front of Giovanna. All the more reason to make him leave Puglia; hopefully he would forget about her and his new fascist friends. Just as Vitantonio was about to go inside the palazzo he bumped into his sister again, who was waiting for him by the doors to the conservatory. He tried to smile at her, but once again he felt a twisting in his guts: that damn sister of his, everyone was in love with her!
Franco did indeed make himself scarce. A month later, he announced he was going to Rome to study, and a year later he enlisted with the Corps of Volunteer Troops to fight alongside the fascist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.
The Hunt
THAT AUTUMN OF 1943 was becoming a waking nightmare. The further north the Englishman’s band got, the more bullet-ridden bodies they found on the roads. Vitantonio was losing all hope. He would stare at the murdered civilians and imagine Franco encouraging the Germans to shoot them, and he grew obsessed with catching him and making him pay for his cruelty.
On 1 October, they approached Alberona: before they’d arrived the civilians had stood up to the Germans and in the exchange of fire a girl had been killed. They found her at the entrance to town, laid out on the side of the road, as if she were taking a nap – but the blood on her dress left no room for doubt, nor did the scarlet trail she’d left when trying to drag herself away. Vitantonio’s gaze wandered and landed on a swallowtail butterfly zigzagging among the anise-scented flowers of a fennel plant, like the one he’d seen the day he and Giovanna had made love by the pool.
‘Like a trail of love,’ he’d said that morning – that morning that seemed so far in the past now – as Giovanna plucked poppy petals.
‘Like a trail of blood,’ she’d replied.
For four days and four nights, the German rearguard halted the group’s progress, and they were forced to remain at the gates of Celenza Valfortore. At night Vitantonio twisted and turned in his sleep as if he had a fever, trying to banish the repulsive image of Franco from his mind, but his childhood and teenage years kept coming back to him like a nightmare. And the memory of a distant day in October 1934 was the one that haunted him more than any other.
They had got up at dawn to hunt the first thrush and quail of the season in the olive groves near Cisternino. At fifteen, Vitantonio was excited. At the beginning of the year Befana the Witch had brought him his first rifle and he’d be using it that morning for the very first time. As soon as they arrived at the olive groves a thrush took flight and he aimed with precision and sent the bird plummeting to the ground. He had learned to shoot with Salvatore’s gun and had become a fine shot. Mastega, Salvatore’s grandfather’s dog, ran to retrieve the bird and soon reappeared with it in its teeth.
By midday Vitantonio’s bag was full, with eight thrushes and two hares. Franco, on the other hand, had tried to shoot many times, but his hands were shaky and he was afraid of the gun’s recoil. He hadn’t hit a single target. He vented his anger by criticizing Salvatore, who was leading their hunting group.
‘What a bighead. He acts like he’s our leader, but we’re not under his command. He’s only the son of one of our employees!’
‘Cut it out, he is the one in charge here. He’s older, he knows the land and a lot more about hunting.’
When they moved to another olive grove further up, they got a surprise. Just as they squatted behind some undergrowth they saw a flock of turtledoves take flight, as if sensing their arrival.
‘They aren’t trying to fly away from us – there must be a hawk chasing them. That’s why they keep flying about nervously,’ explained Salvatore.
Vitantonio stood up, looking worried. His gaze followed the turtledoves and he hoped they’d get away from the hawk, which had just emerged from behind the trees and was flying in circles, waiting for the moment to swoop on its prey.
Franco stood up as well. ‘He’s got one!’ he shouted excitedly as he watched the hawk sink its claws into the helpless body of a turtledove before carrying it off into the branches of a pine tree. The top of the tree shook as if struck by a sudden burst of wind and a rain of white feathers fell to the boys’ feet.
Franco was still shouting eagerly. ‘Wow, that was amazing! Did you see how he killed it?’
Vitantonio didn’t answer. His eyes were glued to the ground, staring at the feathers of that poor bird. Later, when they went back to the trulli with their bag full, they all congratulated Vitantonio on his aim and forgot about the turtledove.
That evening, on the threshing floor, Donata and Concetta skinned the two hares and left them in a marinade of wine, onion, celery, bay leaves, pepper and a pinch of chopped thyme. The next day the two women spent all morning in the kitchen. They sautéed a few pieces of salted pork with half a cup of oil, onion, celery and a couple of carrots. They took the hares out of the marinade, let them drain and then put them to brown in the pan. Then they left them simmering gently. Every once in a while one of them would go over to the pot and toss in a glass of liquid from the overnight marinade or a bit of stock. An hour and a half later, they pulled the hares out and spent more than an hour stripping the meat off the bones and chopping it up into very small pieces.
At midday, when the Vicinos and the
Galassos began to arrive with all their children, Concetta hurried to cook up some orecchiette, while Donata put the pan back on the stove with the sauce and the vegetables, and added the chopped meat to it. Once the pasta was ready, they mixed it all together and brought the pan to the table, provoking a storm of compliments, which in turn competed with the praise for Vitantonio’s skill with the shotgun. Normally, when the men from the trulli had caught good game, they would take it to the town: to the landowners, the doctors and sometimes the priest. Skinny always took the hares he and Salvatore caught to Nonna. But that day, the hunter had been Vitantonio and he wasn’t obliged to butter up any landowners. He smiled and bowed his head: the praise made him feel both proud and embarrassed.
Nine years had passed since that trip to the olive groves of Cisternino, but Vitantonio was now feeling that same impulse to hunt. This time his prey was his cousin and he wouldn’t rest until he had made him pay for so many hundreds of innocent deaths. They didn’t reach Celenza Valfortore until 5 October, and when they finally entered the town they saw that they were too late again: this time, artillery fire had killed three children and a seventeen-year-old boy. None of Donovan’s group had any tears left. That night they again swore that they’d make those responsible pay dearly, but right then the Englishman told them, ‘They want us to enter the lion’s den: tomorrow we go behind German lines.’
Convinced that the Germans were slowing them down so that they could reinforce their positions in the north, the Allied command pressed Lieutenant Donovan’s group to advance behind enemy lines. They needed some accurate intelligence.
They left Celenza with their minds reeling from the terrible image of the three children blown up by German artillery.
‘We need to make up for lost time and cross the front line,’ urged the Englishman.
It was hard to tell exactly where that line was. It was changing constantly. The marshland between the Trigno and the Sangro rivers was a conflict zone and the many comings and goings made it hard to establish firm positions. Twice they exchanged fire with German soldiers without knowing whether they were retreating stragglers or an advance party in a new counter-attack. Donovan decided to be as cautious as possible: they slept during the day and walked at night.
The Last Son’s Secret Page 19