I turned back into my room, the sense of loneliness strong in me. It was a feeling that not even the exotic warmth of a bath could dispel. But as I lay relaxed in the soapy water with the sunlight slanting in through the open french windows, I understood the reason for it. For three months now I had been married to a ship. For three months I had been fully occupied, mentally and physically. I had been living with men who were alive and interested in doing a job. Now I was alone for the first time since my arrival at Trevedra—and I was alone in this pleasure city where people went to bed together too often and loved too seldom. When I had been here before the essential rottenness of its way of life had been half-hidden beneath the purposeful khaki figures of men who knew where they were going and intended to get there. Now Rome had been handed back to the Romans. The little men with bad teeth and a penchant for fish and chips and their big slouching, gum-chewing, hunker-squatting allies were gone. And I was in civvies instead of a naval uniform.
The sense of loneliness was inevitable.
Dinner was in the tiled courtyard on the second floor. I had a table to myself and a bottle of Spumante. And then I strolled up to the gardens of the Villa Borghese and watched the sun set behind the dome of St Peter’s in a gold and purple sky.
Back in my room at the hotel the first thing I noticed was the faded photograph of Monique Dupont lying on the table by my bed. I could not remember taking it out of my suitcase. But there it was—the picture of a girl of fifteen. Now she would be twenty-two, and if all went well I should meet her to-morrow.
I lay awake till the moonlight flooded the room and the tiles of Rome gleamed white between the bars of the balustrade—thinking about the girl. Though it was more than a month ago that I had read it, her mother’s letter was still fresh in my mind. I had read it on the sands of Plymouth Sound. Now I was in Rome on my way to meet this girl whom I only knew through an old and faded photograph. It was a strange quest. But now that I had undertaken it and come so far in my search it had become almost a personal thing.
Just over two years ago she had been working on a farm in Itri. She had then travelled to a place near Rome after the fall of the city. Presuming that she was an attractive girl, what would be the effect of a nature half English, half French, exiled in war-torn Italy for six years? Clearly she would have seen more of life than most girls of her own class at that age. She had been in Naples during the bombing. She had lived in the disease-ridden, garbage-cluttered streets beyond the Via Roma for three months. She had worked as a farm girl and seen the farm and its owners destroyed by the Germans, She had trekked north to another farm.
If she were still at that farm, she would have been there for over two years. Allowing that she was a normal, passionate girl, with as much of the animal as there should be in a human being, what would have become of her? Would she have married a local farmer’s boy? Or would she still be with her aunt, a young woman working on a farm with half the village lads sniffing round the house? Or—far more likely—would I have to seek her in Rome itself, a typist, the wife of some shopkeeper or the mistress of a business man?
In view of the thoughts that kept me awake so long, it is not surprising that I started out for Pericele in the morning with a sense of excitement not unmixed with foreboding.
The sulphur springs on the way to Tivoli were open. And in Tivoli itself there were tourist buses in the square outside the Villa d’Este, the great house where the Borgias once lived. One wing had been destroyed by bombs. The rest remained, a monument to man’s fascination for the sound of falling water. The gardens of the villa fall steeply to the gorge that contains the water of the falls and every path ends in a fountain or is arched with water.
We took the Arsoli road east as far as Vicovaro, and then turned left up into the hills past the Villa d’Orazio, where the poet Horace wrote his odes, sublimely oblivious over his rich red Tuscan wine that they would become the bane of children studying the classics through the ages.
Pericele was another of these mountain villages perched precariously on top of a hill. It was almost like being back in Sicily, for a naval officer does not get far inland and this was my first sight of the Abruzzi Mountains. We were already more than 2,000 feet up. All around us were peaks rising to 5,000 feet. They hemmed us in, so that there was no air and it was hotter than it was down in the campagna.
We passed the rusting remains of a burnt-out tank and the brown twisted carcases of two lorries that had clearly been stripped by the local inhabitants of all useful parts in the same way that vultures strip the flesh from a dead animal. The grass was still lush here in the valley. The road ended abruptly at a blown bridge that had still not been repaired and we dipped sharply to the bed of the stream on a diversion that had originally been bull-dozed by Eighth Army engineers. The broken arches of the bridge that had once spanned the fosse strode across the floor of the little valley like petrified giants raising their gaunt mortar arms to heaven in impotent fury.
Though time had weathered the destructive effect of high explosive, it was still clear that for a brief moment war had filled this little valley, now lying lazy and pleasant in the heat, with the thunder of guns and bombs and the chatter of small arms fire. There were bullet scars on the stone work of the viaduct and the roof of the little church on the other side of the stream showed the brighter colouring of new tiles as though they were battle scars.
Beside the empty stream ran a small stone aqueduct. And though it was the dry season, it was still feeding water into big concrete storage tanks. These tanks held the water that kept the grinding wheels of a mill half-hidden among the trees at the end of a short track turning all the year round.
And nigh above the valley and the little church and the broken arches and the mill towered the village of Pericele. The windows of its houses looked out above our heads to the mountains and there was no sign of life.
A bullock cart was coming down the track on the other side of the ford. A woman walked beside two great lumbering beasts. A man, walking up the track, shouted and waved a short cane. He quickened his pace. The bullocks stopped. The woman cringed away from him as he approached the stationary cart. He towered above her, a big man in riding breeches and gaiters. He pointed to the yoke. The cane flashed twice in the sun. The girl flung her arms up, her back against the side of the cart.
And then the scene was suddenly normal again. The bullocks were plodding on down the track. The woman was walking beside the cart, having adjusted the yoke. And the man with the cane was walking on up the track to the main road. As we splashed through the ford I was wondering whether he had really struck her or whether I had just day-dreamed it.
The bullock cart pulled in to let us pass. It was piled with dung and the flies buzzed incessantly. The driver was not a woman—it was a girl. She was tall and fair-haired, which is unusual in the peasants of the Tuscan hills. Her face was pale and strained. It was not beautiful, but it had a quality that made me look at her closely. She wore a plain black dress. It hung on her loosely, for it had no belt. Her feet were bare and grey with dust, her hair hung damply on her head. But she had a certain pride of body—her breasts thrust tautly at the sack-like dress and she walked erect and easily. Her eyes met mine as we drove slowly past the cart. They were grey unhappy eyes.
We rejoined the interrupted road and turned up the hill to Pericele. I looked closely at the man with the cane as we passed. He was big and thick-set with heavy brutal features. Somehow he seemed to fit the primitive surroundings. He walked with the air of a man who was cock of his own particular walk. He was like a prize bull—a powerful animal of a man with a passionate nature and a hasty temper. I felt sorry for the girl with the grey eyes. Clearly he regarded her as a serf.
But I didn’t stop. To explain to a man that women should not be beaten to ensure that they do what they are told was clearly a waste of time up here in the hills—and dangerous. The law does not mean all that much up in the mountain villages where the feudal system still exists in f
act, though not in theory.
Dark stone houses, buzzing with flies, closed in on us as we climbed the road to the village. Faces appeared as though by magic at every window. And women, fat and slovenly and work-worn, crowded to their doorways to see us pass, a thousand brats clinging to their black dirt-stained skirts. Young girls, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and sexually uninhibited, smiled and giggled at us as we went-by.
Clearly our arrival was an event in the village.
We reached a little square with the inevitable fountain in the centre. Here old men sat smoking in the sun and women were doing the washing in the cold mountain water. The first tomato crop had been gathered in and on every ledge and roof and even in the street in front of the houses the red fruit, halved, lay drying in the sun, the pips showing yellow. We stopped and children crowded around the car. They did not speak. They just stared, wide-eyed.
I asked for the village priest, and we were directed across the square to a narrow little street that was barely wide enough for the car. It had once been stepped. But the stones were worn and time and the villagers had filled it with so much dirt that it was possible to use it as a road.
The sound of the old Lancia as it stormed the hill was shatteringly loud. The road was so narrow that we seemed to be thrusting the grey houses and the crowding faces of the villagers back on either side. Children ran behind us, clinging to the bumpers and the spare wheel.
So we reached the very summit of the village. And here, in a little square, was the priest’s house. It was not really a square. It was just that the road widened out where it stopped at a grey stone wall. There were houses on one side. But on the other, a wall topped with drying tomatoes guarded a sheer drop to the valley floor. We stopped the car and found ourselves looking down upon the road by which we had come, all flanked by mountains, towards Rome and the sea.
“Blimey!” said Boyd, as he got out and saw the silent gaping crowd of children, “we might be the Pied Piper like.”
The word “Inglese” was whispered through the clutter of small faces. A ragged urchin with dark eager eyes came up to Boyd and said, “Sigaretta, Johnnie?” The old cries burst forth then in a clamour of small voices. “Cioccolata! Sigaretta! Hey, Johnnie, gomma!”
“Silenzio!”
The babel of voices froze. The door of one of the houses had opened and a dark-haired man with a thin face and deep-socketed eyes stood in the doorway, his hands white against the folds of his black gown.
His dark eyes stared at me unwinking as I told him who I was looking for. Not a muscle of his face moved, but at the name Galliani I had a feeling of tension.
“Galliani!” he said. “Maria Galliani. She worked for Guido Mancini down in the valley. She is dead now.” He said it with a disinterested bluntness that was either callousness or the familiarity with death that is perhaps inevitable in a man of his profession.
“When did she die?” I asked.
“Just over a year ago. It must have been shortly after she came to the village. She had suffered and it was too much for her.”
“And what about the girl?”
“The girl,” he repeated. And I had the impression he was playing for time. Or perhaps it was my imagination. There seemed no vestige of humanity in him. His voice was cold, unhelpful, as though he resented being questioned about a member of his flock.
“The French girl,” I said. “Her name was Monique Dupont.”
“I know of no girl of that name in the village.”
“But surely,” I said, “Signora Galliani brought with her a girl when she came to live in the village. She would have been about twenty.”
He seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “Ah yes, it is possible that she has some French blood. She is fair—not like our mountain people. She was Maria Galliani’s niece. Her name is Monica. Why are you interested?”
I told him then about Monique’s mother in England and how I had followed the trail of the girl from Naples to Itri and on to Pericele.
He said nothing when I had finished. He stood there quite silent for a moment. He might have been praying for guidance. Or he might have been thinking out his line of action. At any rate he suddenly said, “Scusate” and disappeared into the house.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FRENCH GIRL
WHEN the priest came out again he had on his wide-brimmed black hat. His quick scurrying walk, which scattered the children out of his path, made him look like a black beetle hurrying about its urgent affairs. “I will take you to see the grave of Maria Galliani,” he said and bustled into the car. As we moved back down the hill to the village square he said, “Are you a Catholic?”
I shook my head.
His white hands fluttered in an expression of resignation. “I was thinking that you might have liked to give a candle for her. The English are always so generous.” He shot me a quick glance and then sighed. “The little church where she is buried is very poor and much repair work had to be done after the battle by the bridge. But God was merciful. He damaged only His own house and left the village untouched.”
He directed the driver down through the village to the ford and the little church in the valley. We were met at the door by an old man with a grey beard and watery eyes. The priest motioned Boyd and myself inside.
Like everything about the village the church was depressingly primitive. It was cool and almost damp inside and the peeling walls were festooned with tawdry gilt and white plaques to the dead of the village. On the wall opposite the door a life-size figure of Christ hung dejectedly from its cross. It was badly carved in wood and on a shelf at its feet stood jam jars of faded summer flowers.
I don’t think I have ever seen such an ugly interior to a church. The villagers seemed to have vied with one another to hang upon its walls the most gaudy memorials possible within their means: even to little glass or celophane cases filled with artificial lillies.
The priest had stopped by the door to talk to the old man. But now he came in and led us up to the altar. “These were carved by Maria Galliani,” he said, pointing to a pair of candlesticks delicately worked in some local wood. On the base of each was carved the name of her husband—Emilio Galliani—and the sign of peace.
“In the cemetery you can see her grave,” the priest said, leading us out again into, the bright sunlight. “She had not worked long with Guido Mancini, but he bought her a good headstone.”
By the great marble tomb of the Iori family, half-hidden by two black crosses that marked the graves of German soldiers killed in the fighting at the ford, was a sandstone boulder. On it was roughly carved—“Hic Jacet Maria Galliani, Requiescat in Pace.” There were wild roses in a little sunken vase.
“And now, what about the girl?” I asked, as he showed no sign of moving.
“The girl? Ah, yes—she is at Mancini’s farm. She is all right. But she will be up in the hills now, minding the goats. It will be difficult to find her.” His eyes watched me out of their dark sockets.
“Then let’s go to the farm and see,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “If you will wait while I have a word with the wife of the man who looks after the church. She has been ill and it would be unkind if I came here and did not visit her.”
I nodded, and he led us back through the cemetery and disappeared into the open doorway of the cottage attached to the church.
“Like a bloody beetle scurryin’ into ’is ’ole, ain’t ’e,” said Boyd. “Somehow I never trusts them blokes. I seen quite a bit of ’em in the little fishing villages along the coast an’ I always ’ad a feeling they was living on the igorance of the people.”
It was nearly ten minutes before the priest reappeared. He got into the car and we drove on down the track, across the ford and then turned left below the broken arches of the bridge. Beyond the mill the track turned right and ran along the banks of the stream through a cool tunnel of trees. At the end of this track stood Mancini’s farm.
It was a biggish place of grey stone clutt
ered with outhouses. The farmyard was strewn with dung that steamed in the midday heat. The lazy hum of flies was the only sound when the Lancia’s engine stopped. A small boy came out of the house with a sly sidelong glance. His hands were deep thrust into the pockets of trousers that had once been khaki serge and there was milk on his upper lip which he kept on licking at with quick nervous movements of his tongue.
The priest knocked at the door and a dog barked lazily as though the effort were too much for him in the heat. The flies buzzed incessantly, settling clingingly in the sweat of face and neck. The door with its blistered paint opened suddenly and framed in the darkness of the interior of the house stood a woman of about thirty-five.
She was a big woman with wide hips and breasts that sagged unsupported beneath her black cotton dress. Her hair clung dankly to her head, which was large for a woman, and she wore a pair of big gold earings. Her lips were a thin bitter line in the olive skin of her face and she had the dark brown eyes of a bitch that has been whipped too often to expect any good to come of life. Her belly was big with child and where it stretched her dress the cotton was a deeper black with sweat. Her legs, braced wide apart to support the weight of her, were marked with bites which showed a dull red through dark hair. Her big peasant feet were thrust incongruously into an expensive pair of mules, the finery of which was filmed with dirt and threadbare with constant wear.
“There is an Englishman here to see the Galliani girl,” the priest said.
She spread out her hands in the Italian gesture of resignation and I saw a great purple bruise on the inside of her left arm. “The girl is in the hills looking after the goats,” she said. She said it flatly, without expression, as though we ought to know that the girl was in the hills looking after the goats.
The priest shrugged his shoulders. “I am sorry,” he said to me. “It is as I told you. She will not be down until the sun sets and to search for her on the hills would not be good in the heat. But at least your journey has not been wasted. You will be able to tell her mother that she is all right and well cared for. When Maria Galliani died she made Guido Mancini the girl’s guardian. He is prosperous, as you see. He will find her a good match and he has agreed to provide her with a dote.”
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