‘Do you think you could kindly pass on a message to your aunt? It is something…of importance.’
I was taken aback by the baron’s tone of voice. It had suddenly become harsh, even unfriendly.
‘Certainly, Baron…Nothing…personal, is it?’
He halted again, and his eyes hardened disagreeably: ‘What do you mean? I am a gentleman, Sir.’
I noticed that his boots were dirty.
‘I didn’t mean to…’
We started walking again, slowly, because it was uphill now.
‘There is a squadron of British fighter planes…’
I fixed my eyes on the empty path before me, the tufts of grass motionless between the stones, the trees in the distance.
‘They are British, SPADS, single-seater biplanes. It is always the same squadron that goes back and forth above the roof of the Villa, always the same. Does the kingfisher mean nothing to you?’
I quickened my pace a little. ‘The king…what?’
‘It’s a bird. It’s the symbol of that pilot, the leader of the squadron. A pilot and a half, too. He flew straight through a burning captive balloon. They’ll have given him a medal.’
I struggled to show no feelings.
‘Please tell Donna Maria, and also your grandfather, that to transmit to the enemy any information, of any kind and by whatever means, is a crime, and the code of warfare punishes this crime,’ he said, lowering his voice slightly and stopping, so as to oblige me to look at him, ‘with death. When we find spies, we hang them.’
‘He got out of bed on the wrong side this morning,’ said Grandpa over his cup of white coffee. He was right; Renato was not in a good mood. The major’s warning had left us all stunned. Grandma thought we should stop what we were doing for a while, but how could we warn Brian to stop what he was doing? And at a moment like this, with the Austrian offensive due at any time…Grandma had given orders to keep all the shutters of the bay window closed, meaning ‘Nothing to transmit,’ and seeing all the troop movements that were going on Brian would surely get the message.
‘But we can’t give up now, of all times,’ Grandpa had replied. ‘It’s now that our information is most important. That’s why the baron warned us.’
Grandma had no fears for herself, but for the rest of us, for the Villa, and for me. I was not afraid; I had grown fatalistic and kept repeating one of Grandpa’s little sayings, ‘To do anything good in life you have to count on a bit of luck.’
‘Do you think he’ll hang us?’ I was sitting with my legs dangling, and the hay was pricking my neck.
Renato handed me the tobacco pouch. ‘He doesn’t know how we send messages. And he doesn’t hang anyone. And as for the information, Brian sees it for himself, flying over the plain. The roads are choked with columns of carts and there are more and more camps. Mine is a different job.’
‘What is it?’ I lit the pipe.
‘The organization helps—’
‘Prisoners to escape?’ I was aiming to surprise him.
‘Go on with you! Who’s going to escape? Nobody wants to go back to the trenches. The deserters, they’re the ones we want. It gets harder and harder to cross the river. Deserters – Czechs, Slovenians, Bosnians – they bring us up-to-date, precise information of the kind that can change the course of the fighting, not the kind we give about troop movements. One reconnaissance plane is enough for that.’
‘Why are you telling me?’
‘Because at this point you’d better know what we’re really signalling with those shutters. They don’t tell what you’ve been led to believe, but rather when, where, how and who will be crossing the river.’
‘Why haven’t you told me before?’
‘Didn’t need to before, but now…You might be useful to the organization…In case they kill me.’
‘Tell me everything, then.’ I was less frightened than excited.
He blew smoke into my eyes. ‘That’s enough for now, Paolo. The rest when necessary. How about stretching our legs?’
We took a turn around the village. No one was about. We paused to smoke for a while with the innkeeper, who with the return of good weather had put a bench outside the inn door. Even the inn was deserted.
‘They all go to Sernaglia. All the money now goes to Sernaglia, and the girls, the ones who ply their trade, they go where the money is, in Sernaglia! Ah…times ain’t what they used to be.’ His pipe between his teeth, he patted the pocket of his tattered apron with his palms. ‘And now this place is empty.’
This was said in our dialect, which Renato liked and understood well, though he couldn’t speak it. In the village he was known as ‘that bloody Tuscan’, envied because he’d ‘found a cushy job’. But the innkeeper had taken a liking to him, and there was always ‘a drop of grappa’ for us. We drank in silence for a long time, smoking away and gazing at the treetops. Then the host, showing us all the gaps he had between his teeth, took Renato aside and said something in his ear. It crossed my mind that he too was in Intelligence.
On our way back to the Villa we circled round the church, just to lengthen the walk and talk about this and that.
From far away came the boom of a cannon, then a second, then a third. The church windows rattled above our heads.
‘They’re adjusting their range-finders, testing their trajectories. And meanwhile putting a scare into the new arrivals down there in the trenches. Listen, now the Italians are returning fire.’
By now one roar followed hard upon another, and the rhythm increased to a continuous battering. The windowpanes were one continuous rattle. We moved away from the church.
‘It’s odd, this drumfire. I thought they were short of ammo.’
‘A dress rehearsal?’
‘Maybe. Rations have been improved these last few days. They’re doing their level best to raise the morale of the troops, but I don’t think they can achieve much.’
‘D’you think they’re in such a bad way?’
‘Look at their uniforms, they’re all in rags and they’re hanging off them.’
He quickly led me to a spot near the chapel. With the first warm weather the stink of the latrines had intensified. I wrinkled my nostrils.
Renato took his dead pipe from his mouth. He used the stem to open a little gap between the leaves of the lime tree. ‘See those lines?’
‘Laundry…underpants,’ said I.
‘Of the emperor’s officers.’
‘So what?’
‘Try to describe them. Take a good look.’
‘Pants hung up to dry…What else? Well…rather tattered.’
‘Only rather? Let’s call them holes attached to scraps of pants.’ He gave me a serious look. ‘If we win it won’t be because Diaz is better than Boroevic. All generals are good at coming on tough when others are doing the fighting. No, we are going to win because of those tattered underpants. You don’t win if you’re in rags. Do you remember that prisoner from Ancona, down at the depot a couple of weeks ago? He belonged to a captured patrol of ours. The chap who got talking to your grandfather, remember?’
I nodded.
‘He had a new uniform, with all the buttons attached, and boots of real leather, not cardboard. If this is the underwear of the officers, the gods of the Danubian empire, just imagine that of the infantry who have to wade up to their chins to cross the Piave.’ He replaced his pipe in his mouth. ‘If you are reduced to rags then you’re a down-and-out, and an army of down-and-outs never won a war. We are going to win because America has made us a vast loan. I don’t think the Kingdom of Italy will ever manage to repay it, but in the meantime the war will be ours. And what goes for us goes also for the French and for the British. What’s needed in combat is food, water, clothing, munitions, and all these things have to be transported and distributed when and where they are needed.’ He spoke passionately, not looking at me but at the air before him. ‘It’s been a while now that they’ve been eating their mules, and now even rats are running short.�
� He shook his head. ‘Those underpants tell their own story.’
Twenty-Five
AUSTRIANS, HUNGARIANS, BOSNIANS, CZECHS OR POLES, whatever they were they hurled themselves on the polenta. ‘Take a good look at them,’ said Renato. ‘The four of them together don’t weigh two hundred kilos.’ The innkeeper stood over them, stroking his moustache and musing. Even he had got thinner. We passed them by, slowing our pace a little. It seemed to me I could hear their jaws chewing at the dry polenta.
‘You see, Paolo, battles are won or lost by armies, but wars are another matter. Wars are fought by whole nations, which means banks, industries, cows, grain, petrol. Things that take time to get together, and you have to make them last for years, not weeks, do you see? These soldiers here are as brave and disciplined as ours, no more, no less, but if Austria doesn’t give them enough to eat…’
‘Will it be long until they make their offensive?’
Major Manca knocked out the bowl of his pipe against a tree trunk. Then, walking on with the empty pipe between his teeth, he said in a low voice, ‘Yesterday I saw eleven railway wagons on a siding at the Pieve station. Flour! Tell your grandmother this. The reconnaissance planes won’t see them because they are camouflaged with foliage. A massive bombing is needed, and at once! That flour is worth ten times more than an ammunition dump.’
We parted. I went to take the message to Grandma, who set to work to put it into code. She didn’t take long about it. Aunt Maria said this must be the last time: ‘Too risky to go on.’
Grandma objected. ‘The washing line…well, we know, lots of people are doing it. But the shutters…’ She had a streak of caprice in her, a consequence of that haughty character which had caused us to stay put on the east bank of the river. Moreover, the code was her brainchild.
Grandpa, on the other hand, was confident. ‘I know it doesn’t take much for them to hang Italians, and in war there’s no sending for a lawyer. But our baron is a devotee of good manners, and good manners can be counted on. They get under the skin far more than certain frivolities such as love or faith.’ With a slight smile on his lips he shot me a conspiratorial glance. ‘That major isn’t going to shoot anyone…The fighting doesn’t depend on what happens at Villa Spada.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ said Aunt Maria grimly.
May is also the month of the Madonna and of First Communions. I was conscripted. ‘Family duty.’ The glass in the church windows had been replaced by tarred cardboard – an Italian bomb had sent them into smithereens. The children all in white were chattering away in the front row while their mothers, great black praying mantises, mumbled incantatory prayers in the row behind. Don Lorenzo had banished the tribe of grandfathers, who were dozing off with their ballast of grappa, to either side of the high altar. The fathers, though, had been borne off by the war, or were toiling with the scythe. Also present were several prisoners of war in working clothes, and a few Austrian officers in battledress. My family was drawn up in the back row, so as not to attract attention. Aunt Maria sat between Grandma and the Third Paramour, and Teresa and Loretta were there as well. Grandpa’s absence certainly came as no surprise to our parish priest.
The mass didn’t take long. The Sernaglia sector was on the alert, and from one moment to the next the church might be requisitioned for use as an army hospital. But this early warning had been going on for days, and no one – except for Don Lorenzo – was taking it very seriously. After the reading from the Gospel, our priest launched into an invective against humanity at war. He spiced it up with a few insults directed at the occupying troops, whom he then praised for their ‘devotion to the Queen of Heaven’, indicating the blue and white plaster waitress endlessly smiling in the light of the flickering candles. Playing it both ways, I thought, remembering Grandpa once saying, ‘They’ve been doing this for two thousand years. War annihilates families and nations, but God’s collecting bag is always there.’
Coming to the end of his insults and eulogies, Don Lorenzo aimed a finger at the painted vault.
‘Brethren,’ said he, raising his voice a little, ‘when a cow has a calf all Our Lord’s creation rejoices. The flies have a new rump to call their home, the peasant will have milk and meat, the wolf hopes to make a meal of it, no one is sad. No lament arises from the earth. But at the birth of a man, the finest creature in all Creation, we do not know whether to be happy or sad, because God has given man the freedom to do evil. The viper that bites us, the weasel that steals chickens, the wasp that stings…these are not wicked creatures. They live according to their lights, even if they are bothersome. But Eve ate the apple because she believed in the serpent instead of in God.’ His forefinger circled above his head before stiffening into a flagpole indicating the blue of the vault with its well-worn apparatus of symbols. ‘I have always known that there above,’ he went on, without lowering his finger or relaxing the strained rigidity of his arm, ‘there is the force which moves the sun and the other stars, but the trouble is that this force also causes bad things that we do not understand, not even if we think about it for a hundred years. In fact, those who think about it too much understand it even less than those who spend all day re-soling shoes, Don Lorenzo’s word upon it!’ The forefinger was now lowered, and struck the lectern with a slight thump. The sermon was over and mass moved swiftly ahead until the altar boy’s bell tinkled to announce the elevation. It was then that the big guns were heard. Sudden and loud. Far and near.
‘They’re firing from the Montello,’ said Aunt Maria. The phalange of mantises broke ranks.
‘If they’re firing hundred-pounders they’ll knock us cock-eyed,’ said Teresa, and maybe her saying that aroused Madame Misfortune, for with a crash and a splatter we were all smothered in white powder and plaster.
Don Lorenzo put down the chalice. ‘Dearly beloved brethren, stay calm! This is the House of God…Outside, all of us… but calmly. This way, quick, children first. Ite, missa est. Hurry along!’ And with his hand he bestowed on the dust cloud a hasty yet expansive sign of the cross. The din the children made as they rushed out vied with the roar of the artillery. Mothers, grandfathers, prisoners and soldiers stampeded from all sides. The priest’s housekeeper had thrown open the side door, and we scattered into the street, passing beneath the bell tower. The sound of gunfire slackened off, and shortly fell silent. Everyone was coughing. Me too, as I joined Aunt Maria in giving an arm to Grandma, for the Third Paramour had vanished, making good use of his big feet.
All that had fallen was a metre of the cornice, but it had whitened quite a stretch of roadway. We were white from head to foot, and in such manner we entered the Villa gates.
The salute from the sentries – the rifle butts thudding on the ground – sounded unintentionally comic: soldiers saluting ghosts.
That evening I spent with Giulia. I went over to her place just as soon as I had had a bit of a wash in the tub in the loft.
The Third Paramour’s shutters were open. He had not yet washed, and was sitting there in an old armchair, white with plaster and fright. Maybe he didn’t even see me, because he neither smiled nor waved. He was staring wide-eyed at the window, his long cigarette holder in his mouth. The cigarette was out. I climbed two at a time to the balcony and knocked.
Giulia opened the door, saw me and burst out laughing, ‘Doesn’t one wash when one calls on a lady?’
‘But I have wash—’ and didn’t have time to finish. Her lips forced my mouth open and her tongue was warm and hard. Without letting go of me she steered me to the sofa and threw me down on it. We undressed quickly and then, slowly, made love.
The only woman I had come near to ‘knowing’ was one in the Casino di Siora la Bella, a high-class brothel in the middle of Treviso, where I had been dragged by Grandpa. I was fourteen when I lost my parents, and as soon as I turned sixteen Grandpa decided that my erotic education was up to him. It all happened unbeknownst to Grandma and Aunt Maria who, though they might have guessed something, were careful to keep it t
o themselves. Thus it was that on 12 August 1916, my sixteenth birthday, I found myself in a piazza in Treviso, a town which the hazards of war had not yet transformed into a fortress. We put up in a hotel which had huge windows of vaguely Gothic character giving onto an alleyway scarcely wider than a village street. We had a glass of strong liquor at the bar downstairs before going on to the brothel. Grandpa prepared me for the event with homilies slightly less sententious than usual, worked up to it gradually, said that there were certain things a man had to learn early and well, and that certain women knew how to teach, and he concluded with a piece of advice: ‘Remember that even a prostitute must be treated as a lady, because this is expected of you…and in any case she deserves as much.’
So it was that my first contact with female flesh was the large pink bosom of a little dark-eyed blonde who greeted me with the words, ‘Hello there, my name’s Graziella, let’s go and arse around, you handsome fella.’ I imagine she said the same to everyone, even drooling septuagenarians, because she liked the rhyme. But what I never confessed to Grandpa was that with Graziella I had not gone through with it, out of bashfulness, I think, or maybe because that unassuming girl was shrewd enough to realize that for me that was not the moment. And when she took me back to the parlour where Grandpa Gugliemo was awaiting me, in the company of a newspaper, cigar and whisky, she told him I had behaved like a man and a gentleman; and what’s more she said it in a firm voice, giving nothing away.
That evening Giulia taught me that even a woman who has you fall in love with her has something of the Graziella in her, and it is as such that you must treat her, with virility and passion, but keeping something back for yourself. I thus managed not to tell her what I felt for her. When I got dressed I felt proud of having remained myself, and for the first time since I had met her I felt sure that she too had felt something for me. Maybe she might betray me, maybe she might humiliate me, but some part of her, for an indefinable moment, had been truly mine. And that was enough.
Between Enemies Page 17