by Jess Walter
Dee Moray had been watching the conversation, understanding none of it, but she could tell the old woman was trying to communicate something important. “What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Pasquale said. “Talk of witches.”
“What?” Dee Moray said. “Tell me. Please.”
Pasquale sighed. He rubbed his brow. “She say . . . young people do not die in Porto Vergogna . . . no one die young here.” He shrugged and tried to smile away the old woman’s crazy superstition. “Is old story . . . stregoneria . . . story of witches.”
Dee Moray turned and looked full into Valeria’s moley, mustachioed face. The old woman nodded and patted Dee’s hand. “If you leave this village you will die a whore’s death, blind and thirsty, scratching at your dry dead birth hole,” Valeria said in Italian.
“Thank you so much,” Dee Moray said in English.
Pasquale felt sick.
Valeria bent and spoke sharply to their guest. “E smettila di mostrare le gambe al mio nipote, puttana.” And stop showing your legs to my nephew, you whore.
“You, too,” Dee Moray said, and squeezed Valeria’s hand. “Thank you.”
It was another hour before Tomasso the Communist arrived back at the hotel, his boat lurching into the marina. The other fishermen were already out; the sun was rising. Tomasso helped old Dr. Merlonghi onto the pier. In the trattoria, Valeria had prepared a hero’s meal for Tomasso, who once again removed his cap and was quiet with the importance of his job. But he had worked up an appetite and accepted the meal proudly. The old doctor was wearing a wool coat, but no tie. Tufts of gray hair shot from his ears. He followed Pasquale up the stairs and was out of breath by the time they reached Dee Moray’s room on the third floor.
“I’m sorry that I put you to all of this trouble,” she said. “I’m actually feeling better now.”
The doctor’s English was more practiced than Pasquale’s. “It is no trouble seeing a pretty young woman.” He looked down her throat and listened to her heart with his stethoscope. “Pasquale said you have stomach cancer. When were you diagnosed?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“In Rome?”
“Yes.”
“They used an endoscope?”
“A what?”
“It is a new instrument. A tube was pushed down the throat to take a photograph of the cancer, yes?”
“I remember the doctor looked down there with a light.”
The doctor felt her abdomen.
“I’m supposed to go to Switzerland for treatment. Maybe they’re going to do it there, this scope thing. They wanted me to go two days ago, but I came here instead.”
“Why?”
She glanced at Pasquale. “I’m meeting a friend here. He picked this place because it’s quiet. After that, I might go to Switzerland.”
“Might?” The doctor was listening to her chest, poking and prodding. “What is to might? The treatment is in Switzerland, you should go there.”
“My mother died of cancer . . .” She paused and cleared her throat. “I was twelve. Breast cancer. It wasn’t the disease so much as the treatment that was difficult to watch. I’ll never forget. It was . . .” She swallowed and didn’t finish. “They cut out her breasts . . . and she died anyway. My dad always said he wished he’d just taken her home and let her sit on our porch . . . enjoy the sunsets.”
The doctor let his stethoscope fall. He frowned. “Yes, it can make worse the end, treatment for cancers. It is not easy. But every day is better. In the United States are . . . advances. Radiation. Drugs. It is better now than it was with your mother, yes?”
“And the prognosis for stomach cancer? Has that gotten any better?”
He smiled gently. “Who was your doctor in Rome?”
“Dr. Crane. An American. He worked on the film. I guess he’s the best there is.”
“Yes.” Dr. Merlonghi nodded. “He must be.” He put the stethoscope over her stomach and listened. “You went to the doctor complaining of nausea and pain?”
“Yes.”
“Pain here?” He put his hand on her chest and Pasquale flinched with jealousy.
She nodded. “Yes, heartburn.”
“And . . .”
“Lack of appetite. Fatigue. Body aches. Fluid.”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
She glanced at Pasquale. “And some other things.”
“I see,” the doctor said. Then he turned to Pasquale and said in Italian, “Can you wait in the hall a moment, Pasquale?”
He nodded and backed out of the room. Pasquale stood outside in the hallway, on the top step, listening to their hushed voices. A few minutes later, the doctor came out. He looked troubled.
“Is it bad? Is she dying, Doctor?” It would be terrible, Pasquale thought, to have his first American tourist die in the hotel, especially a movie actress. And what if she really was some kind of princess? Then he felt ashamed for having such selfish thoughts. “Should I get her to a bigger city, with proper care?”
“I don’t think she’s in immediate danger.” Dr. Merlonghi seemed distracted. “Who is this man, the one who sent her here, Pasquale?”
Pasquale ran down the stairs and returned with the single sheet of paper that had accompanied Dee Moray.
Dr. Merlonghi read the paper, which had a billing address at the Grand Hotel in Rome, to “20th Century Fox special production assistant Michael Deane.” He turned the sheet over and saw there was nothing on the back. Then he looked up. “Do you know how a young woman suffering from stomach cancer would present to a physician, Pasquale?”
“No.”
“There would be pain in the esophagus, nausea, lack of appetite, vomiting, perhaps some swelling in the abdomen. As the disease progressed or the cancer spread, other systems would be affected. Bowels. Urinary tract. Kidneys. Even menstruation.”
Pasquale shook his head. The poor woman.
“These could be the symptoms of stomach cancer, yes. But here is my problem: what doctor, when encountering such symptoms, would conclude—without endoscopy or biopsy—that the woman has stomach cancer, and not a more common diagnosis?”
“Such as?”
“Such as . . . pregnancy.”
“Pregnancy?” Pasquale asked.
The doctor shushed him.
“You think she’s . . .”
“I don’t know. It would be too early to hear a heartbeat, and her symptoms are severe. But if I was presented with a young female patient complaining of nausea, abdominal swelling, heartburn, and no menstruation . . . well, stomach cancer is extremely rare in young women. Pregnancy . . .” He smiled. “Not so rare.”
Pasquale realized they were whispering, even though Dee Moray wouldn’t have understood their Italian. “Wait. Are you saying that maybe she doesn’t have cancer?”
“I don’t know what she has. Certainly there is a family history of cancer. And maybe American doctors have tests that haven’t reached us. I’m just telling you that I couldn’t determine that someone has cancer based on those symptoms.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“No.” The doctor seemed distracted. “I told her nothing. After all she has been through I don’t want to give her false hope. When this man comes to see her, perhaps you can ask him. This . . .” He looked at the paper again. “Michael Deane.”
This was the last thing Pasquale wanted to ask some American movie person.
“One other thing.” The doctor put his hand on Pasquale’s arm. “Isn’t it strange, Pasquale? With this film being made in Rome, that they would send her here?”
“They wanted a quiet place with a view of the sea,” Pasquale said. “I asked if they wanted Venere, but her paper said Vergogna.”
“Yes, of course. I don’t mean this isn’t a fine place, Pasquale,” said Dr. Merlonghi, hearing the defensiveness in Pasquale’s voice. “But a town like Sperlonga is almost as quiet, and is on the sea, and is much closer to Rome. So why here?”
Pasquale
shrugged. “My aunt says the young never die in Porto Vergogna.”
The doctor laughed politely. “You’ll know more after this man has visited. If she’s still here next week, have Tomasso the Communist bring her to my office.”
Pasquale nodded. Then he and the doctor opened the door to Dee Moray’s room. She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her. She was cradling the big pasta bowl, the carbon-copied pages of Alvis Bender’s book on the pillow next to her.
4
The Smile of Heaven
April 1945
Near La Spezia, Italy
By Alvis Bender
Then spring came, and with it, the end of my war. The generals with their grease pencils had invited too many soldiers and they needed something for us to do and so we marched over every last inch of Italy. All that spring we marched, through the chalky coastal flats below the Apennines, and once the way was cleared, up pocked green foothills toward Genoa, into villages crumbled like old cheese, cellars spitting forth grubby thin Italians. Such a horrible formality, the end of a war. We groused at abandoned foxholes and bunkers. We acted for one another’s sake as if we wanted a fight. But we secretly rejoiced that the Germans were pulling back faster than we could march, along that wilting front, the Linea Gotica.
I should have been pleased merely to be alive, but I was in the deepest misery of my war, afraid and alone and keenly aware of the barbarism around me. But my real trouble was below me: my feet had turned. My wet, red, sick hooves, my infected, sore feet, had gone over to the other side, traitors to the cause. Before my feet mutinied, I thought primarily about three things during my war: sex, food, and death, and I thought about these every moment that we marched. But by spring, my fantasies had given way entirely to dreams of dry socks. I coveted dry socks. I lusted, pined, hallucinated that after the war I would find myself a nice fat pair of socks and slide my sick feet into them, that I would die an old man with old dry feet.
Each morning, the grease pencil generals caused artillery waves to crash to the north as we marched in our sodden rain gear into a slashing, insistent drizzle. We moved two days behind the forward combat units of the Ninety-second, the Negro Buffalo Soldiers, and two battalions of Japanese Nisei from the internment camps, hard men brought in by the grease pencils to do the heavy fighting on the western edge of the Gothic Line. We were goldbricks, mop-ups, arriving hours or days after the Negro and Japanese soldiers had opened the way, happy beneficiaries of the generals’ crude biases. Ours was a recon/intel unit, trained specialists: engineers, carpenters, burial detail, and Italian translators like me and my good friend, Richards. Our marching orders were to come in behind the forward units to the edges of overrun and destroyed villages, help bury the bodies, and hand out candy and smokes in exchange for information from whatever frightened old women and children were left. We were meant to gather from these wraiths intelligence about the fleeing Germans: placement of mines, locations of troops, storage of armaments. Only recently had the grease pencils asked that we also record the names of men who’d escaped the Fascists to fight alongside us, the Communist partisan units in the hills.
“So it’s to be the Communists next,” grumbled Richards, whose Italian mother had taught him the language as a boy and thus saved him from heavy combat years later. “Why can’t they let us finish this war before they start planning the next one?”
Richards and I were older than our platoon-mates, he a twenty-three-year-old two-stripe, me a twenty-two-year-old PFC, both of us with some college. In neither appearance nor manner could anyone tell Richards and me apart: I a lanky towhead from Wisconsin, part-owner of my father’s automobile dealership, he a lanky towhead from Cedar Falls, Iowa, part-owner with his brothers of an insurance firm. But while I had back home only a string of old girlfriends, a job offer to teach English, and a couple of fat nephews, Richards had a loving wife and son eager to see him again.
In 1944 Italy, no piece of intel was too small for Richards and me. We reported how many loaves of bread the Germans had requisitioned and which blankets the partisans had taken, and I wrote two paragraphs about a poor German soldier with impacted bowels cured by an old witch’s palliative of olive oil and ground bonemeal. As dreary as these duties were, we worked hard at them because the alternative was liming and burying corpses.
Clearly, there were larger tactics at play in my war’s end (we heard rumors of nightmare camps and of the grease pencils dividing the world in half), but for Richards and me, our war consisted of wet, fretful marches up dirt roads and down hillsides to the edges of bombed-out villages, short bursts of interrogating dead-eyed dirty peasants who begged us for food. The clouds had come in November, and now it was March and it felt like one long rain. We marched that March for the sake of marching, not for any tactical reason, but because a wet army not marching begins to smell like a camp of hobos. The bottom two-thirds of Italy was liberated by then, if by liberated one means ground over by armies that chose only to shell the most beautiful buildings, monuments and churches, as if architecture were the true enemy. Soon the North would be a liberated rubble heap as well. We marched up that boot like a woman rolling up a stocking.
It was during one of these routine sorties that I began to imagine shooting myself. And it was while debating where to put the bullet that I met the girl.
We had hiked up some donkey highway, two tracks in the weeds, villages appearing at the tops of knolls and the bottoms of draws, hungry bug-eyed old women slumped alongside roads, children peering from windows of broken houses like modernist portraits, framed by cracked sashes, waving gray fabric, holding out their hands for chocolate: “Dolcie, per favore. Sweeeets, Amer-ee-can?”
A gravel tide had washed over these villages, smashing everything once coming in, again going out. At night we camped on the outskirts of these rutted burgs, in leaning barns, in the carcasses of abandoned farmhouses, in the ruins of old empires. Before crawling in my mummy bag each night, I eased out of my boots, took off my socks and swore at them, pleaded with them and hung them in desperation from a fence post, a windowsill or tent strut. Every morning I woke with great optimism, put these dry socks on my dry feet, and some chemical reaction ensued, turning my feet into moist, larval creatures that fed on my blood and bone. Our supply sergeant, an empathetic, fine-boned young man who Richards believed had his eye on me (“You know what?” I told Richards, “If he can fix my feet I’ll blow taps on his yacker”), was constantly getting me new pairs of socks and foot powders, but the traitorous creatures always found their way back in. Each morning I sprinkled powder in my boots, put on new dry socks, felt better, took a step, and found rapacious leeches feeding on my toes. They were going to kill me unless I acted soon.
On the day I met the girl, I had finally had enough and gotten the nerve to act: AD, accidental discharge, right through one of my rebellious hooves. I would be sent home to Madison to live with my parents, a footless invalid listening to Cubs games on the radio and telling my nephews an ever-improving story of how I lost my foot (I stepped on a land mine, saving my platoon-mates).
That day we were to march to a newly liberated village to interview survivors (“Cand-ee, Amer-ee-can! Dolcie, per favore!”), to ask the peasants to rat out their Communist grandsons, to inquire as to whether the routed Germans might have happened to mention, as they ran away, oh, say, where Hitler was hiding. As we marched toward this little hill town, we passed, just off the road, the rotting body of a German soldier draped over some kind of rough, half-finished sawhorse made of gnarled tree limbs.
This is mostly what we saw of Germans that spring, corpses previously taken out by hardened soldiers or even harder partisans, whose work we superstitiously respected. Not that we were simply tourists ourselves; we’d seen a bit of action. Yes, dear dull nephews, your uncle had issue upon which to fire his .30 caliber in the enemy’s direction, little puffs of dirt exploding at the end of my every shot. It’s difficult to know how many clods of dirt I hit, bu
t suffice it to say I was deadly to the stuff, dirt’s worst enemy. Oh, and we took a bit of fire, too. Earlier that spring we lost two men when German 88-mm cannons hailed the road to Seravezza and three more in a horrific nine-second firefight outside Strettoia. But these were exceptions, frightened bursts of adrenaline-blinding fear. Certainly, I saw valor and heard other soldiers testify to it, but in my war combat was something we tended to come across after the fact, grim puzzles like this one, left as brutal tests of illogic. (Was the German building a sawhorse when his throat was cut? Or was it part of his death, sentenced to have his throat slit across a half-finished sawhorse? Or was it symbolic or cultural, like a knight slung over his horse, or merely coincidental, a sawhorse happening to be where the German fell?) We debated such questions when we encountered these meat puzzles: Who took the head of the partisan sentry? Why was the dead infant buried upside down in a grain bin? Based on smell and insect activity, this German meat puzzle on the sawhorse was two days past decent burial, and we hoped that if we ignored him we wouldn’t be ordered by our CO, the gap-toothed idiot Leftenent Bean, to deal with the ripening body.
We were safely past the body and burial detail when I suddenly stopped marching and sent word forward that I would deal with the stewing corpse. I had my reasons, of course. Someone had taken the dead German’s boots already, and he’d surely been picked clean of insignia and weaponry and anything else that might make a decent trophy to show to the nephews at Thanksgiving in Rockport (“This is the Hitler battle spoon I took from a murderous Hun I killed using my poor bare feet”), but for some reason this particular dead man still had his socks. And so crazed was I with discomfort that this dead man’s socks looked to me like salvation: two clean, tight-woven sheaths that appeared to cover his feet like bedsheets at a four-star hotel. After dozens of pairs of Allied replacement socks courtesy of my empathetic supply sergeant, I had thought I might try my luck with Axis footwear.