The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  When they finally received news that his father had been captured in Bardia, it shocked Lucio less than the ease with which their lives continued in the face of it. The next day dawned just like the one before, and the one before that. They still had their work to do, the hours longer and harder, especially as his mother refused to let them leave school, making them catch up on their chores at first light and well beyond dusk. Yet the months and the seasons trickled on, like the streams in the valley that always found their course somehow, regardless of the dams and diversions the village children built across them. When he thought of his father now, he was but a presence below the surface, a ripple in a moving current where a boulder or log had toppled and sunk.

  And so it seemed unfair that they, rather than Fabrizia, received the first news after nearly five months of waiting.

  ‘You might as well tell me. I know you got a letter yesterday. Pettegola has already announced it.’

  His mother dropped the basket on the floor and sighed. ‘Poor Orazio,’ she said. ‘Pettegola might have saved him the trouble of riding twenty kilometres uphill.’

  Orazio Sposi, the postman who rode from Monteferro on his bicycle once a week, rarely arrived before the contents of his letters. His wife, Giga Sposi, as postmistress of Monteferro, had access to one of the only telephones in the mountains, allowing her to call Professore Centini’s wife at the town hall and appraise her of news well before Signor Sposi had even finished affixing his bicycle clip at the gate. The war had led Signora Sposi to see a certain national duty in her prying, and in recent years it was said the postmistress had cultivated a surgical hand with a steaming kettle and knife. Disseminating updates from the front and screening letters for anti-Fascist plots, she liked to suggest, were a contribution to the war effort. Everyone else, of course, saw her for what she was: a gossip, a pettegola.

  ‘Is she right then? Has Aldo been sent to England?’ Fabrizia set down her knife and rested her fists on the chopping board, clenching them until her knuckles turned white.

  His mother nodded. ‘He’s been shipped from the camp in South Africa to Liverpool.’

  Fabrizia crossed herself. ‘Thank Santa Lucia. He’s safe, at least.’

  ‘They’ve put him to work on a farm, in the south somewhere … here, read it yourself. There isn’t much. I suppose they’re not allowed to say a lot.’

  She laid the flimsy letter on the counter. Lucio stepped towards the door and Fabrizia’s eyes fell on him, swimming with worry and hope — searching for something of Urso, anything. He shook his head at her, the slightest of movements, almost nothing at all. But she caught it. Her hand closed over the letter and the colour drained from her cheeks.

  ‘Keep it,’ his mother said to her friend. ‘Read it later when you’re alone.’ She picked up her basket and headed for the door.

  ‘Leti?’ Fabrizia called, following them. ‘Those Germans. They say they have money and food to trade for wine and grappa.’ She cleared her throat, forcing herself to become the businesswoman again. ‘They might be good for more than spying on our intimates.’

  His mother smiled, and nodded her farewell. As he left, Lucio felt Fabrizia press something into his palm. Outside, he sat on the lip of the fountain and watched the new spring sunlight playing on the water. The slice of smoked meat was tough and dry, but it didn’t matter. He chewed on it and tried to remember the last time he had tasted guanciale. Not since before the war, not since Urso had folded up a slice and thrust it in his mouth.

  That afternoon he found his mother in the cellar, among the dwindling bottles of Raimondi Gold. They could count them now within a few minutes. His grandfather’s chestnut barrels were empty. He and Vittorio had searched every cave and derelict stable between the Vigna Alba and Collelungo, halfway to Montemezzo, but they could not find where he had hidden his still and vats. So even if they could have muddled together a recipe, they lacked the equipment to make the grappa. Instead they traded their vinacce with a maker in Morolo, but Lucio could tell that the resulting grappa was nothing at all like Raimondi Gold. They sold it to a tavern on the other side of Monteferro and kept the Osteria Nettuno supplied from their original stores of Gold.

  That first harvest after Nonno Raimondi had gone, his mother had sworn them all to secrecy, including Fagiolo. ‘If Padre Ruggiero finds out we no longer know the recipe, he’ll give the Vigna Alba to another family — the Ronzoni or the Ippoliti, someone he thinks can work it better now Aldo is gone. I know it.’ She had searched Fagiolo’s face a little desperately. ‘Please, Michele.’

  ‘You just have to ask,’ Fagiolo said. She had taken his hand and pressed it in her own. ‘You always knew, Rondinella, you only ever had to ask.’ Lucio hadn’t heard the name before. He always thought his mother had never been given a nickname. It was the supreme insult of the Montelupinese — to be so far below notice to deserve one, a ghost in one’s own town. But this name caught something of the truth of her, he thought, something beyond her illness, her difference. Rondinella. She was like a swallow, quick and sleek and restless. But Lucio never heard the name mentioned again.

  He sat next to his mother on the cellar steps, mentally counting the bottles, as he knew she was. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, nudging his knee with hers. ‘If we manage it carefully, we can keep Padre Ruggiero supplied and still have a few bottles to sell. It will see us through.’

  Through till what? he wanted to ask. Till the next meagre harvest, the next hungry spring, the end of the war … or till his father came home? Nonno Raimondi’s method was gone for good and it was his fault. In the village, rumours had started flying, and he was at the centre of them: he was too stubborn or too stupid to follow his grandfather’s instructions; Barilotto had backed the wrong boy; just like in scopa, he never could pick a winner. Lucio could endure the talk, the stares and shaken heads as he passed. But what he couldn’t stand was his mother sitting in the cellar, her tired optimism.

  Before dusk settled, he went to Collelungo to feed the animals. He usually went alone. It wasn’t a job his brother liked, but that night Vittorio said, ‘I’ll come with you. Iana can have a run in the meadow behind the stable. You never know, she might find a rabbit.’ They hadn’t seen rabbits as low down as the meadow since the war began, and Vittorio knew it. Lucio understood his brother wanted a reason to pass the German camp.

  They started the climb by the shorter mule path. Vittorio’s gaze kept straining out across the hill, in the direction of the washhouse, but it was too early for lights and they could barely make out the tents on the campo.

  When they reached the stable, Lucio brought the donkey inside for the night and fed the scraps to their hens. There were only two left now; a fox had slaughtered the others that winter. He had seen the hole under the wire where it had dug, blood staining the snow, brindled feathers floating in the weak morning light as he opened the pen. Four of their hens lay limp, still warm, their heads crooked. The two that remained were huddling in the roost, darting their beaks nervously, recounting in disjointed clucks the whole sad tale. He wondered why foxes did this, massacred a whole brood to take one hen. Was it the confusion of the birds scattering in all directions as they sprang? Or did they get a taste for blood, for the sport of it?

  He closed up the stable and noticed Viviana’s tail weaving through the meadow grasses, her nose emerging intermittently, like a ship’s prow above the waves. The last pink light hung on the ridge behind Carpeto, but in the air there was a warm buzz that promised summer nights. It was an evening for lingering. He thought of his mother: she would have liked to sit next to him on a dusk like this, the rooftops of the village tinged pink, their glow siphoning slowly into night.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he heard Vittorio calling from the edge of the track. His brother was standing with his back to the light, fidgeting as he peered down to the tents in the growing dark. Lucio watched him stride down the cobbled path, the altern
ate route back to the village, less steep but longer, passing directly in front of the washhouse and the German camp.

  ‘Hold on,’ Lucio said, ‘I think Iana might have something —’ but his brother had already disappeared around the first bend.

  Lucio waited for the dog. Her tail was no longer visible in the undergrowth, but he didn’t call for her. Instead he traced the shadow of the mountains creeping up the meadow, felt the pleasure of being alone in the last circle of sun crowning the hill. He closed his eyes. The hum and tick of the grasses was strangely mechanical; birdsong rattled in distant trees.

  When the shot rang out, it was so loud that he felt as if the mountain had cracked and was trembling under his feet. He stumbled, his head pitching as it did when his father slapped him across the ear. The echo rang off the rocks, shaking the crows from the trees and making the chickens screech in the barn. His first thoughts were for Viviana, but when he heard her barking — the fast, excited bay she made when she cornered her quarry — he breathed again.

  At the bottom of the dim meadow someone was squatting in the grass. Viviana was nearby, partly barking, partly growling. He thought it might have been Vittorio returned for them, but when the figure stood he saw it was a man, tall and broad-backed. In one hand he held up something long and thin, coiling slightly like an unwound whip. Afraid for his dog, Lucio began to run towards them. Viviana met him halfway, giving an uncertain whine. He slowed to a walk. The man turned to face him, and for a moment they stood in the dusk, looking at each other.

  He was a soldier from the camp, jacketless, his grey shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, his collar open. Lucio noticed that his skin was beaded with sweat, and his hair, falling across his forehead, clumped together. He might have come from working in the fields, or logging timber, except that his polished leather boots were the finest Lucio had ever seen, unlike anything a Montelupinesi would own. In the half-light, with the mountains behind him, he seemed conjured from another world — one of the brigand fairytales his mother used to tell him when he was a child: the disinherited count who took up with bandits to take revenge on a tyrannical stepfather. As Lucio went closer, the whip dangling from the soldier’s hand became a snake. He raised it higher for Lucio to see. It was headless, charred and blasted at close range.

  ‘It nearly bit your dog,’ the soldier said. Lucio didn’t answer. He was busy gathering every new detail: the paleness of the man’s hair shining like moonlight as the dark descended, the unexpected delicacy of the pistol that had made such a huge sound, the snake’s shuddering carcass as the soldier motioned towards the dog.

  ‘She’s very beautiful. A good hunter, I think?’ the German said, and Lucio became aware of the fluency of his Italian. ‘I was watching her from the trees there, and I believe she could have taken it. But she’s too handsome a dog to risk on a snake. You don’t mind me stepping in?’

  Lucio frowned, grappling with all the questions, the words that scattered in his mind. He reached for Viviana’s collar to tug her away, even though he wanted more than anything to stay and listen to this man speaking with his foreign rhythms but familiar words, like listening to an old song played on an instrument he’d never heard before.

  ‘Don’t you speak?’ The German’s face was frank, open as an invitation. He holstered his gun and reached for Viviana. Lucio gripped her collar but the dog was calm, letting the soldier massage her ears. He felt a little betrayed: she had never taken to strangers before. When travellers passed them on the road to Cori, he always held her firm, sensing the low growl creaking within her, the rise of her hackles. He secretly liked this about her, felt comforted by it. But now she fawned under this man’s touch like he was some long-lost master with offcuts of mutton in his pocket.

  ‘What do you call her?’ the German asked.

  ‘Her name is Iana … Viviana.’ Lucio almost started at the sound of his own voice, his mouth working as if it didn’t belong to him.

  ‘Viviana.’ The soldier nodded at the dog. ‘I think it’s not the first time you have cheated death, is it, my beauty?’ His eyes were grey, still as the lake in winter, with something knowing about them.

  ‘She doesn’t usually let strangers fuss over her,’ Lucio said.

  ‘Then I feel honoured.’ The soldier laid the snake on the ground and rolled down his sleeves against the chill. ‘I have two Weimaraner bitches back home. I take them out in the Schwarzwald near my house in Baden.’

  Lucio listened to the German words slipped between the Italian. He had never known anyone who could handle two languages so comfortably. Urso’s older brother, Cano, could say a few phrases in English when he was drunk. They were his only legacy of a year in New York, with the exception of a tattoo he had to cover for Mass on Sunday. He rolled the English words off his tongue by rote, like a child at the catechism, and his accent was so Italian he might have been speaking some remote southern dialect for all his audience knew. But this German seemed to move between the two worlds easily, as easily as he inhabited the space in the meadow, like he had been coming here all his life.

  Lucio’s gaze was drawn to the gun in the leather pouch. The German retrieved the pistol and held it up, flicking a catch on the grip and releasing the magazine. He lingered over the procedure, inspecting the loading mechanism and then the latch, but Lucio realised he wasn’t checking the gun: he was allowing him a good look at it without the pain of asking.

  He had never seen such a compact weapon. At the markets in Cori, he sometimes saw bolt-action rifles slung across a man’s shoulder, once even with a bayonet still attached. Fagiolo had a hunting piece of his father’s hanging over the bar in the osteria, dusty as the ancient carafes and demijohns that lined the top shelves. According to Urso, the traditional hunting etiquette of the mountains considered it bad form to use firearms in the chase — an insult to the skill of the true huntsman and his dog. Listening to their slurred debate from the battlement wall, Lucio knew well enough that such sentiments masked poverty with pride.

  This pistol was sleek and neat, the grip the colour of polished walnut. It fascinated him, the beauty and the danger of this object that seemed to fit perfectly in the soldier’s hand. When he looked up, he saw the German was amused. Lucio rubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand, wishing his brother was there. Vittorio would have asked all the right questions. Vittorio would have had the adult conversation he could not.

  The German’s fingers worked a latch at the side of the barrel and, holding the shaft, he offered up the grip. Lucio hesitated, but the soldier waited patiently for him to take it. The heft of the gun in his hand took him by surprise and he had to steady his wrist. He laid the weapon flat in his palm so he could touch the cold metal, run his fingertips over the grooved lines moulded into the stock. It wasn’t wood, he felt now, but the same smooth brown material as Signora Centini’s telephone. He cradled the gun before his chest. He would have liked the time to copy it, to make a sketch in his notebook.

  ‘You’re a man of detail and design, I see. As am I, given the choice.’ The German took back the weapon and ran his thumb over the heel of it, seeming elsewhere. ‘We’ve lost the light. Shall we walk back?’

  Perhaps it was the way he picked up the carcass of the snake and clicked his tongue to Viviana, the way they began to walk, comfortable in their silence, that made Lucio finally venture a question.

  ‘What did you hunt? You and your dogs in Germany?’ He drew in the night air, and became conscious of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, the hum of the German’s voice as they descended the hill. And, as he listened to his answer, Lucio thought of the next question he would ask him, and the next.

  By the time Lucio and Vittorio were harvesting the first figs from the Vigna Alba, the German unit had moved into rooms at the town hall. From the orchard, they could see the rear balcony of the building, where Professore Centini and Padre Ruggiero had taken to smoking ciga
rs with the unit’s captain, Herzog Schlosser. Captain Schlosser seemed to command an endless supply of goods from Monteferro, some of which had been luxuries in the village even before the war: real coffee, sugar and foreign liquor. Professore Centini appeared more than happy to sacrifice his mayoral office and reception rooms in return for some of these things, while Padre Ruggiero conferred his benediction on the Germans. They were both even happier still to silence Signora Mazzocchi’s grouching — at least for the present.

  ‘That woman will be the death of me, Padre,’ Lucio heard the mayor complaining to the priest in the osteria one evening, before the place had filled up with its new foreign clients. ‘Only the other day she was finding fault with German army-issue bread, saying there was no substance to it. If she’d known, she would have rather not traded her eggs. Was there anything I could do to get them back? Could I have a word with Captain Schlosser?’

  ‘What, about her eggs?’ Padre Ruggiero asked, incredulous. Through the beams of the pergola, Lucio could see his belly shuddering with laughter under his robes, his face red with amusement; yet he made no sound, as if that might demean him somehow.

  The mayor lifted his shoulders and implored the priest with open palms. ‘Eh, Padre? I ask you? Before the Germans, she’s grumbling about having to tap her bread to get the weevils out. Now she says the German bread doesn’t fill her up. What can I do? Some people are never happy.’

  Padre Ruggiero shook his head sympathetically and drained his glass. Fagiolo stepped out of the bar and came to their table with another carafe.