by Jo Riccioni
After the storms had passed and he could go out to hunt again, he no longer saw the blood on the snow from the mice he gutted, the dun feathers he plucked from a trapped sparrow. He only saw his mother sleeping through the day, or her wide glassy eyes as she stared at night across the frosted valley, so clear she might throw a stone and shatter it like her own reflection on the thin ice of the lake. They barely spoke. There seemed nothing to say.
Spring arrived in slow increments. The gush of the mountain jangled in his dreams, the pale sun lingered above the lake where the first insects began to shiver, the forest’s soft grind and crack seemed suddenly noisy to him. He started to grub for snails and slugs, sprouting arugula and chicory, eventually birds’ eggs. Viviana unearthed warrens densely packed and warm, writhing with insistent life. Their bellies complained at being filled again. But in the evenings Lucio sat on the rock ledge and watched such spring storms as he had never seen before: the flares of light that changed night back into day, the delayed response of mortar that grumbled under the surface of the earth and jarred his bones, loose in his skin.
All through the winter, he had felt the cough of distant explosions in his chest, had seen the planes cutting the skies as effortlessly as migrating birds over the range. He’d heard the boom of jettisoned bombs, and in their wake the heightened peace that made him flinch at every sound — the quarrel of the birds in the trees, an ox lowing at plough, an axe starting up again in the valley. Afterwards it all felt so ordinary, so timeless, that the drone of the engines seemed destined for some other place, some other war, far away. But now this dull shelling that shook their nights without relief had become purposeful in its stealthy encroachment, as predictable as two dogs, pack hunting, inching in on their kill.
The baby came too soon and too fast, as if it sensed the urgency about them. Lucio was hunting to the south, but Viviana had had no luck the whole day and his traps were empty. Unable to face returning with nothing, he slept the night in a mossy basin under an overhang of boulders. His redemption came in the morning, when he found a patch of wild strawberries, tiny and perfumed like violets, ripened in the sunny lee of the rocks. He gathered them in his pockets, imagining their redness in his mother’s hands. But when he called out to her at the mouth of the cave, she didn’t answer. As he entered, he could hear her breath, gradually made out her prone form clutching at the slick of a baby, blue and waxy as a hatched chick, already bringing its wide mouth to her nipple. Next to her lay one of Urso’s pikes, which she had used to cut away the cord. She was marble white, her hair clinging wet about her neck, her mouth slack with exhaustion. But her eyes, as he drew close, seemed too intense, alive and burning with determination in her face.
‘A girl,’ she said. He squatted by her and she gave the baby to him, surrendering it like she had only been waiting for him to come. He took the shrivelled thing — hardly more than a handful of flesh — to the light outside so he could see her. Pink suffused the blue of her skin as she grimaced and mouthed her silent wonder. And he felt like he had woken from a night terror, or the place where his mother went when she had a seizure, the fearful strictures of his heart loosening and letting the blood pulse through once more.
Later he took the bloodied clothes and blanket and washed them in the lake. The afternoon light had already ripened between the trees, and the busy forms of insects were caught in it as if in syrup. The pollen of the chestnut catkins touched the surface of the lake and made it shudder like Viviana’s skin. He wrung out the blanket, aware of the dog’s tail in the undergrowth, twitching from time to time. He spread the washing across the bushes at the lake’s edge where the next day’s sun would catch them, and then he called to Viviana, clicking his tongue in the way Urso had always done. She didn’t come, but over the incline away from the lake he heard her start up the baying that told him she had something in her sights.
He ran towards the sound, a chill flashing through him as he began to recognise, between the dog’s barks, the unmistakeable grunts of a boar. Viviana was crouching on her haunches in the shade of a great chestnut, her paws spread, unmoving, monochrome in the dusk, as if she was rendered in ink or marble, caught in the scene of Urso’s famous bookplate. He called her name and his hand went to the skinning knife at his belt. He remembered the neat stroke across the neck of the boar cradled at his father’s chest; Valeriana’s head lolling over Urso’s shoulder; the curl of the snake’s carcass, like a question mark in Otto’s hand; the badger’s blood anointing Vittorio’s cheek in the light of a lantern. He gripped at the knife, but even now it felt cumbersome in his hand, too large as he kneaded his palm against its handle, trying to discover its groove, its fit. It still felt wrong, like using someone else’s scythe at harvest. His failings smarted in him as if he had scored the knife along his own flesh. He snatched at Viviana’s collar and yanked her back, calling her off. The boar shredded through the undergrowth, squealing out its taunt. Lucio stood panting, staring after it as the ferns thrashed between the whispering trees.
Leyton
1950
Uncle Jack’s wake, like his life, was quiet and unremarkable, dogged only by the stubbornness of Aunty Bea. She refused to set foot in a public house, obliging the villagers to run up and down the high street in the bitter November wind, ferrying pint glasses and sherry between the memorial hall and the Green Man. As a result, most of the mourners went home more sober than when they’d started. Bobby gave a rather stiff and awkward rendition of Abide with Me on his clarinet, which left everyone dry-eyed and her aunt nodding approvingly. And even when Connie, escalating between helpless grief and carefully guarded rage, was spotted sitting in Vittorio’s car at the edge of the green, no scene ensued. Instead a fraught calm settled between her and her aunt, exhausting them both with the weight of avoidance and the fermentation of things left unsaid.
Uncle Jack’s ashes arrived, disappointing in their drab little urn, observing them from the mantel beside the ticking clock. And still they skirted around each other, their movements slowed, their voices muted, as if the house was submerged in water. Two weeks passed and they barely left Grimthorpe Lane, Mrs Cleat insisting that Connie stay at home to grieve and comfort her aunt, when all she wanted, in fact, was the paltry distraction the shop could provide. She felt like she might suffocate in the house, the days marked only by her aunt clearing and blackening the grate, then building and lighting the fire again. The flames did nothing to warm them, but Connie was grateful for a focal point at least, the hypnotic relief they provided from the grey that engulfed her.
‘What’ll you do with the ashes?’ she asked Aunty Bea eventually, when she could bear their silence no longer. The urn seemed to blush in the firelight, reflecting the embers as they both looked up at it. Connie curled her feet up into Uncle Jack’s chair and leaned her head against the wing, smelling him in it.
‘Enough, now,’ her aunt said, dismissing Connie’s sobs as though she was still a child, snivelling over a grazed knee.
Connie felt anger rising over her grief. ‘Well, what are you going to do? Just sit and stare at that jar every night like he’s still here?’
Aunty Bea stood and set the guard about the fire. She pulled back her shoulders. ‘He’ll be put in the Farrington plot as soon as St Margaret’s is re-opened.’ Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, as though she was outlining a plan she’d been making for some time. ‘I’ll see Reverend Stanton about a service. Jack’s can be the first memorial in the newly dedicated church. He’d have liked that.’
The self-satisfied expression on her aunt’s face shone with something akin to zeal. ‘What do you mean he would have liked it?’ Connie said. ‘He wouldn’t have given a damn! He never wanted anything to do with that church. It’s what you’d like, not him.’
Aunty Bea spun around from the mantel. ‘And what would you suggest? Scattering him in the potato or spinach beds? Or better still, we might sprinkle him in the shed.’ Her tr
ue voice was coming back to her, and Connie was almost glad. Her aunt’s sarcasm was at least familiar, a lifeline of continuity in this terrible flux, and she clutched at it.
‘Only you could belittle everything that was important to him,’ she said. ‘Even now you’re still talking over him, making him small.’
‘Oh, that’s right, I forgot,’ Aunty Bea threw back. ‘You know so much more about him than I do. I was just his wife, after all.’
‘I know enough to understand this isn’t about him. It’s about you. He gave you everything you asked for. But it was never enough, was it? He was never enough. But you didn’t have the guts to go after what you really wanted.’
Aunty Bea blew a sharp burst of air through her teeth. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.’
‘I’m talking about Bill,’ she said.
Her aunt’s mouth slackened. She stared at Connie, and then glanced at the urn with an unmistakeable look of betrayal. She gathered up her lips again, as tightly as if they were on a drawstring, and pulled her bedjacket about her.
‘Yes,’ she said, as if certain of her mind now. ‘I’ll go and see Reverend Stanton tomorrow.’ And she reached down for the poker and broke up the embers in the grate, replacing the guard and turning her back on the room.
Montelupini
1944
Lucio didn’t go back to the cave for three nights. He was haunted by the memory of the boar and the raw helplessness of his sister’s gaze, milky as the stars lost in the lake. He wouldn’t go back empty-handed to his mother. Instead he took Viviana further south, deeper into the scrubs and forests where he saw no other tracks or traps, where he might have imagined himself the last hunter alive were it not for the earthy rumble of mortar, the dull cough of the mountain beneath him, the engines’ drone mingling with the night wind in the beech canopy.
On the fourth day, he was descending through a glade of chestnuts, their new leaves flapping like flags above him, when the breeze brought him the scent of a fire. He heard voices in the dell below and he caught Viviana’s collar, squatting next to her to listen. They were men’s voices, guttural, strangely swallowed, their cadence even more alien to him than when he had first heard German spoken.
He backed Viviana up the incline, getting a safer view of the camp from above. There were twelve soldiers in the clearing, mostly sitting on their haunches or lying about the fire, where they were roasting the carcasses of what looked like squirrel and rabbit. Ammunition pouches criss-crossed their chests, and their striped coats were long and rough as blankets. They wore turbans about their heads, and grubby cowls hung behind their necks or were used to shade their faces while they dozed. Alongside the assortment of rifles and knives strung across them or lying by the fire, they resembled the warrior monks of some heathen sect, like Saracens stepped from the battlefields of the Crusades. Those whose features he could see wore wiry beards, and he thought he had never seen such dark faces, even on Sicilians. There was nothing about them that caught the light, not even their dented helmets painted with crescents like the new moon. They seemed of the elements, the bare toes in their sandals tough and brown as bark, their cheeks and noses pocked like volcanic stone. They might have blown in on a sirocco wind, the desert dust still upon them. Only their eyes were bright, glinting like damp pebbles within the wells of their sockets.
There was one pale-skinned man in their company. He sat at their edge, leaning against the trunk of a Turkey oak. His face was the only one shaven under the tall cylinder of his grubby white cap. Lucio watched him pick at a hole in the sole of his boot. He gave a command to the soldier next to him, in a different language again, the sound of the words this time familiar to Lucio from the radio at the osteria — French, Fagiolo had told him. But these were not the Allied troops anyone had been expecting. As the turbaned soldier stood to obey, Lucio caught a metallic flash at his earlobe, where several large silver hoops were threaded, weighted with leathery pendants, like shrivelled pieces of cured meat. The whites of the man’s eyes, scanning the trees, were tinged yellow, a goatish quality about them, which made Lucio back away as if he had chanced upon something devilish deep within the cover of the woods.
He became panicked. He thought of his mother alone in the cave and started back along his route without stopping. But he had to break the trek when Viviana rooted out a doe and then its kits, not more than a week old, squirming in their warren. He strung the rabbits up, the mother and each tiny baby, recompense for the boar he had passed over: even that pitiful game was better than an empty bag.
Near dark, when he reached the camp, he saw the fire dying under the overhang, the cooking pot empty. All was silent, save for the forest settling into its night-time sounds. He called his mother, but Viviana answered instead with a creaking growl as she took off towards the bushes before the lake. He followed her and found two figures rising from their hiding place in the scrub. One shouted at the dog to hush; the other hurried towards him. His mother threw her arm about his neck, the bundle of the baby slung at her chest.
‘Where were you?’ she whispered, her voice tight with worry. ‘See, Lucio? It’s Fabrizia. She’s come.’
The butcher’s wife looked him over. ‘Madonna,’ she said, her lips hardly moving. ‘The state of you.’ He became conscious of his muddy clothes, the dirt and blood ingrained in his hands, his matted hair. ‘What have you been doing, running with the wolves?’ She came to him and stood over the carcasses he had let fall to his feet. The mound of fur parted under the nudge of her toe, revealing the gutted rabbit, its six babies strung by their hind legs.
‘It was all I could find.’ His apology seemed lost somewhere in his throat.
‘Good enough.’ Fabrizia nodded. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she breathed, as if to herself. She picked up the game and headed for the fire. ‘We’ll be fine. The Allies will be here soon.’
They sat on logs and Fabrizia built up the flames. The baby began to cry. He watched his mother loosening the swaddling, opening her clothes to feed, her face softer than he could remember in a long time.
‘The Germans have left the village,’ Fabrizia told him. ‘They went towards Artena, but they say some got cut off by road and took to the mountains. I came to tell you. When we heard someone coming we hid.’ She thrust her chin towards the scrub by the lake where Viviana had found them. ‘They destroyed half the town hall. Centini’s heartbroken. Loaded whatever stores they could take with them and torched the rest.’ She slit the skins of the kits and tugged them from the flesh like she was pulling gloves from children’s fingers.
‘The Allies will come any day now, you’ll see. Any day. They say there’s already nothing left of Cisterna, half of Cori bombed. The roads are jammed with American jeeps and tanks. It’s all anyone is talking about: when the Americans come, when they bring the food, when they clear the roads and fix the wires and reconnect the water … Ha!’ She brought down her knife upon the legs of the doe. ‘What do they think? The Allies bomb us for months and then they’re going work miracles overnight? A few bars of chocolate, some cigarettes thrown through the streets of Cori, and even La Mula believes their shit won’t stink!’ Underneath her bluster, Lucio could see she was as full of hope as the rest of them. ‘You know, Pettegola told Centini some of those Americans are as big and black as the devil himself! Others even speak Italian. They have family here.’
‘My brother?’ Lucio interrupted her. ‘Have you heard anything of him?’
Fabrizia darted a look at his mother, who was preoccupied with the baby, and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t worry about Primo. If he’s with that Cori gruppo, he’s probably one of the few round here with a full stomach. They’ve become as bad as the crucchi, taking everything they can get their hands on.’
He saw his mother shift. She glanced away into the dark beyond the fire, but whether it was at the mention of the Germans or of Vittorio and the self-styled pa
rtisans, he couldn’t tell. They weren’t the only ones with torn loyalties, he knew. There were plenty of families in the villages whose fathers still wore the Fascist uniform while their sons hid in the hills, wearing the red scarf.
Fabrizia palmed the raw meat. ‘Still, we’ve survived, haven’t we?’ she said, her tone brightening. She began to bone the rabbits. Her fingers were strong and sure, as business-like as if she was back behind her chopping block in the shop. Lucio was lulled into such comfort watching her that, for an instant, all the questions and uncertainty pushing in on him were held at bay. He felt exhausted, so relieved by her presence that he would do whatever she told him.
‘Now fetch that pot so we can get this into your mother,’ she said, nudging him with her elbow. ‘She can’t feed that baby on love alone.’
Leyton
1950
Connie sat under the lychgate at St Margaret’s, feeling the night getting colder, smelling the frost in the air that would settle before dawn. Her fingers and toes were numb, but it was nothing compared to the stony chill of the house in Grimthorpe Lane, petrified by Aunty Bea’s very breath, her unrelenting righteousness. Unable to sleep, Connie had ended up at the church. It was nothing but habit, she told herself. She sat under the lych for a long time, believing that simply being close by would give her the clarity of mind to think over what she needed to do. But when she heard the south door rattle, the key in the lock, she stood up quickly. She knew Lucio’s walk even in the dark, and her relief at the sound of his step made her finally admit she’d been waiting for him all along.