The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

  After his arrest, Mussolini was transported around Italy, firstly taken to small islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, but by September was being held at Campo Imperatore in the Gran Sasso massif, high in the Apennine Mountains. It was from there, on the 12th September, that he was rescued by a detachment of Nazi commandos, under the orders of Adolf Hitler and flown to Munich, where he met with the Nazi Fuhrer. Hitler made him leader of a new puppet state – the Italian Social Republic, created from the northern part of Italy that the Germans still controlled. The state was popularly known as the Salò Republic, because it was run from the town of Salò on Lake Garda where Mussolini lived. But even though he was installed as Duce, he was no more than a pawn in the hands of the Germans who were still in charge in the north.

  About a hundred and seventy kilometres from where Mussolini was pretending to be important again, eighteen-year-old Sandro Bellini’s eyes were itching from the rubber eyepieces that were attached to the lenses of a pair of binoculars. For two hours he had been lying in almost the same position, high up the side of the valley, stretched uncomfortably across a large rock. Another, flatter slab of stone that had probably slid down the side of the mountain centuries ago sheltered him from the rain that had been falling for days and also hid him from view. The object of his rapt attention was a bend in the road a few hundred feet below him, as, indeed, it had been for the last week. Each morning he had risen from bed at four and, after washing down a piece of stale bread with a cup of water, had gone out into the wet darkness, walking the ten miles to his position, all the while climbing steadily into the skirt of mists worn by the mountains.

  Every morning he would curse the weather and his jacket, which had long ago lost any capability of keeping him dry. His boots had also seen better days – unfortunately, long before they had come into his possession. Even the birds seemed to be under cover in these rainy, early winter days.

  By the time of his arrival at his eerie, the sun would have risen and he would take the opportunity before beginning his task to take in the view of this valley he loved so much. A small town sat in the distance, dominated by the bulk of the parish church of San Giovanni, centuries-old dwellings huddling around it in the early morning chill. His eyes moved to the right, to the bell tower of the church of San Pietro, in the village of Dulcino, five kilometres to the north and higher up the valley side. In their house just outside the village, his mother would have been awake for a couple of hours by now and would be preparing food and busying herself with the many chores that made up her day. His eyes strayed across the grey, uneven rooftops above which the smoke of early morning fires was beginning to rise and drift, towards another house no different to all the rest in the village of San Marco. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and the house grew in his vision, but not sufficiently for him. He put the glasses down and wiped the rain from his brow.

  Now it was almost ten o’clock. For two hours there had been a silence broken only by the tapping of rain on the boulder above him and the occasional wing beats of a bird, but now that silence was ended by the sound of a powerful car engine in the distance. It was, however, still some way off.

  He pulled the binoculars from his eyes and, for the hundredth time that morning, wiped the rain from his hair and forehead. Raising them again, he swept them across the bend in the road that was the object of his attention.

  A minute later, the engine noise growing, a German staff car turned the corner, moving at speed, accompanied by a lorry filled with German infantrymen with rifles trained on the surrounding hills. The car swept past a long way below Sandro’s outpost and disappeared in the direction of the town of San Marco, its occupants oblivious to the attentions of the observer in the hills above.

  At last, Sandro was able to remove the binoculars from his eyes. He rolled over on the damp grass and stretched his aching body, looking up at the vast expanse of the sky. The morning was warming up and the clouds that had brought rain since first light were slowly beginning to break up.

  God, how he loved this country. The valley stretched out in front of him, its mountains delineating his entire experience. He had walked them when he was younger, obsessively, for hours on end, rising at dawn, as he had this morning, wrapping some cold meat and cheese in a cloth and stuffing it in his knapsack, before quietly opening the door and stepping out into the half-light. Those were the very best moments, when few were stirring. True, people rose early in the village, but he always tried to be first, to make his mark on the morning, like making the first footsteps in freshly fallen snow. Upwards he would climb, out of the village and off the road, following whatever direction took his fancy.

  Other times he would take rather more food and a blanket, tied in a roll, and would stay away for a night, or sometimes two or even three, often crossing to the other side of the valley and exploring it. And at those times, he would sometimes find himself on a promontory, staring back at life across the valley, knowing his mother would be, as ever, busy in the house or in the yard tending their few scruffy chickens and the goat that they owned. His father would be in their small vineyard, fussing with the branches of the vines, or pulling up weeds. Or he would be in the trees above the village, chopping wood to be stored against the extreme cold of winter.

  At times like that, and even now, alone beneath the vastness of the mountain sky, he would wonder what was going to become of him, where life would lead him. Back then, before the war, only a few short years ago, his life had held promise. That promise was of a life very different to the harsh and difficult lives led by his father and the generations of valley-dwellers who had preceded him. When he could and work at home allowed, he went to school and did very well there. He read books, devoured the classics, in fact, and was considered by the priest the brightest child to have passed through the school for many years. He was a likely candidate, even, for university down in Milan, if the money could be found to support him.

  The war had changed everything, however, and the school had failed to survive its vicissitudes. His teacher was Jewish and had fled to Switzerland in the early days of Italy’s involvement. Sandro had not known what Jewish meant until then. He, himself, would have had to join the bedraggled Italian army if he had not decided to throw in his lot with the partisans fighting in the mountains, causing as much trouble for the Germans as possible.

  He had considered all kinds of possibilities in the last couple of years. War brought lots of things to an end and shattered everyone’s life, but if those shattered pieces could be put together once again, perhaps not in the same shape or form as before, of course, how would they look, he asked himself, what would they make? He felt himself to be on the very edge of just such a new shape or form, felt as if he could fashion any kind of life he wanted, as soon as this was over and the world had once again rearranged itself. As long as he could survive.

  He sat up. The sun was climbing towards its highest point in the sky. All around him the trees, grass and rocks were hushed, expectant. The world was dozing, but he had to be on his way, to rendezvous with what Dino, his closest friend, called his ‘foolishness’.

  Angela was a year older than him, but both were young. She, however, had been married for three years and was the mother of a child – the reason for the marriage – conceived in the woods above the village in the high heat of summer when she knew nothing of life.

  Her husband, Luigi, eight years older than her, had been smitten with her since he had, with pumping heart, watched her dance at a cousin’s wedding, aged fourteen, spinning like a top, her head of long, jet-black hair thrown back, laughter spilling from her mouth like sparkling wine from an over-filled glass. He had watched her from afar over the intervening years – in the market, helping her mother in the small garden of their house, playing with friends and, as she got to her mid-teens, gathered on the small village’s one street, giggling and pouting. He, of course was of another world, another generation and did not even figure in her world.

  Eventually, however, he ha
d taken her in a clearing in the trees above the village when she had not long turned sixteen. He had manufactured an accidental meeting during one of the walks that he knew she was partial to taking after lunch. Afterwards, she cried with pain and he knelt beside her, hot tears laced with guilt searing his cheeks and apologies spewing from his mouth. He expressed his love to her, told her how she made his life complete, how if he could not be with her he would rather die. Finally, as the pain diminished and she returned to herself he promised to talk to her father and ask for her hand in marriage.

  He did not, however; for that night and every night for weeks after, his love for her had leaked out of his body like water from a sieve. He saw her in the street looking at him imploringly and where once just a glimpse of her head across the crowded church on Sunday had sent a shaft of pain through his heart, now he felt nothing but emptiness. It was like a corner of a room in which a much-loved piece of furniture had long stood, but where now there was only a patch of carpet coloured differently to the rest and, somehow, no longer fitting.

  He was horrified, therefore, when Angela’s father summoned him to their house one night and calmly informed him over a glass of grappa that Angela was pregnant and, having confirmed that Luigi was, indeed, the father, he was expected to do the decent thing – inform the priest immediately and arrange the wedding.

  Of course, there was no escape from such a situation, save to flee, but Luigi could not bring himself to do that. It was thus that he found life closing in on him, in a marriage to a beautiful child who was terrified of him for what he had done to her that hot day amongst the trees.

  He was made very welcome, however, by Angela’s family and soon after the wedding, their lives settled into a rhythm of sorts which was not entirely unpleasant. Even Angela began to accept her lot and when the baby arrived a few months into the marriage, a strong, big-lunged little boy with Luigi’s sharp nose and her lovely, sensuous mouth, she seemed suddenly to become a woman, accepting of her place in the scheme of things, even though it was a place not of her choosing.

  She opened herself to Luigi, tried her hardest for him. She learned how to cook, spent hours in the kitchen with her mother, perfecting her skills with polenta and sausage-making and stews of hare or stag and cheese-making. These were some of the best times of her life; the bond between mother and daughter strengthened, became as taut as a metal wire, the mother passing on the collected knowledge of centuries of mountain women. This collected wisdom had been leavened by her own experience during her years of marriage, by the knowledge teased from the commentary provided by her husband throughout those years – ‘That could use a bit more basilico’ ‘More salt in this’, I don’t like that’. That was the marriage of Angela’s mother and father, their relationship defined to a certain extent by food, herbs and condiments. For he spoke little, Angela’s father. In fact, the night he had informed Luigi of his daughter’s situation, those were virtually the only words he uttered to him. He was a silent man, a silent man at the end of generations of increasingly silent men; men who grubbed at the dirt without protest, shifting huge boulders on steep terraces to plant vines, lettuces and leeks, to tend peach trees and tomato plants, to feed the mouths of generations of boy children who would grow up to do the same and girl children who would provide the boys to cultivate, in their turn, the crops of the mountain people’s gardens and small holdings.

  It was from this subsistence that it had been thought Sandro would be the first of his family and one of the few in the entire history of the mountain villages to escape by choice and not because of war or death. His mother had pushed him, and cajoled him; she taught him to read even before he went to school. She, herself had been taught to read – unusual for a woman in these villages – by a solicitous priest. Sandro’s father looked on silently and it was impossible to know what he thought of it all or even if he understood what it all meant – another silent mountain man.

  Some of his silence, however, was caused by pain. He had been ill almost all of Sandro’s life. He was unable to eat properly and experienced terrible stomach pains that would suddenly drain the colour from his face and render it almost impossible to communicate with him. He would disappear deep inside his pain and leave Sandro and his mother somewhere outside, looking in.

  The war had dashed Sandro’s ambition, however. His teacher had fled, his mother was preoccupied by the illness of her husband and Sandro’s interest in books dried up as did his supply of them. As his father would disappear into his pain and his mother would attempt to follow him down that path as far as she could or he would allow her, so Sandro would disappear more and more and for longer and longer into his beloved hills and forests until his parents had almost forgotten that they had a son.

  Then one day it happened.

  Angela, too, had taken to wandering in the hills above the village. After Luigi had eaten lunch and chucked baby Antonio under the chin and had finally, awkwardly, bade farewell to Angela, she would listen to his footsteps fading down through the village towards the garage that he and his father owned down on the main Sondrio road. She had grown to recognise those footsteps so well, had grown to understand them like another language. Walking home at night slowly through the village’s one street, tired footsteps seeking rest. Shuffling footsteps late at night as he returned from the bar that sat next to the garage, picking up custom from eastbound travellers as well as locals. Two or three times a week Luigi would frequent it, the grappa and card games having got the worst of him both in terms of the amount he drank as well as financially. She hated those nights – his drunken fumblings at her clothing and his rough version of love, at first intimidating her and then, ultimately, after many repetitions of the same scene, alienating her. Unnecessarily, too, for she would willingly have given herself to him; she was determined to make her life work, for her child, for herself and, yes, even for the man she had married. They were bound together now, by marriage and by this tiny, demanding bundle of flesh and bone that had come from both of them. She had wanted to make it work. But those fingers clumsily unfastening the buttons of her dress were also undoing the ties that bound them together.

  She began to escape, both in her mind and in reality. She would disappear into the trees above the village, where Luigi had first laid his rough mechanic’s hands on her flesh. Only for an hour or so at a time, the baby cradled in her arms, but it was her hour and no one else’s.

  She wondered why she was different from the others, for the other women did not seem to need this, did not share her burning need to escape. She would meet them in the village, converse with them as she fetched water or hung out washing, but not once did she feel that any of them wanted any more than the life that they had – a life of drudgery enlivened by rare moments of happiness.

  Those rare moments came to her in the free and heady air of her own time wandering in the forest. It was still very close to the village, admittedly, but far enough away to create a distance and an illusion of another life in her mind, a life of golden, wide, tree-lined avenues; of furniture rich in colour and generous in its provision of comfort; of restaurants, filled with exciting diners and purveying exotic food and above all, a life full of people. People who could hold conversations about all manner of things; not just the latest village gossip – this one hasn’t spoken to her husband for a month, that one has a roving eye, this one drinks too much, that one is sleeping with her husband’s brother. No, instead weightier matters would be talked about, such as the drift of the war or the affairs of film stars. It was the stuff of the magazines that she saw now and then. They were ancient, dog-eared and torn by many fingers by the time she saw them, but they filled her with ideas and thoughts and, above all, dreams.

  It was during one of her meandering walks that Sandro entered her life.

  It was a fine winter’s day. Everything felt brittle, as if it were just about to snap – the clouds, the trees, the birds. She was trying to push Luigi from her mind. The previous night he had been even d
runker than usual and had, consequently, hurt her more than usual. At lunch time he had been contrite, but had become angry at her silence as she put his food in front of him and had left the house angrily without his usual few words to Antonio. He had slammed the door and walked angrily down the hill towards the garage. She read his anger in his footsteps.

  That fateful day, she rounded a boulder that guarded a small clearing just as Sandro approached from the other direction, coming downhill after two days in the mountains. His legs were tired and his stride was long and careless. The descent had taken over his progress and his boots were skidding off boulders, sending showers of gravel down in advance of him.

  He struck her and the baby full on, sending her to the ground with a sickening thud that temporarily drove the air from her lungs. Some sixth sense, however, made her cling to Antonio as she fell and, although he was unscathed, she immediately began to feel the stiffness and swelling of what was undoubtedly a large bruise forming on her hip where it had struck a small rock that jutted upwards from the ground.

  When she had found her breath once again, she opened her eyes to see, kneeling beside her a man, or a boy, really, on the verge of manhood. His handsome, weather-darkened face wore a worried frown and his concerned eyes looked into hers, looking for a sign that she was not badly injured by her fall.

  ‘Ah, Dio, are you alright? … are you hurt? … I didn’t see …’

  She sat up, pulling twigs and fallen leaves from her long, black hair and examining Antonio who merely gurgled at her and blinked those dark, brooding eyes.