by Robert Lowry
“Tomorrow,” he said.
And laughing she threw herself on him, kissing him hard. “Sadness is no good. We will laugh. I am always laughing, I am always light.”
But at four-thirty as he walked back with her part of the way to her capitano’s hotel, she held tightly to his hand to stop her insides from swimming around.
“The war’s no good,” Maria said quietly. “We’re always saying goodbye in the war. It’s not good to say goodbye.”
Taking her arm he stopped her and turned her toward him.
“You’re a good person, Maria,” said the large face of her bear Giuseppe. “I love you very much.”
And then he kissed her, lipstick or no lipsick, right there on the street, and left her.
She walked fast, she was late for her capitano, but twice she turned and looked at Giuseppe walking away. She wanted to wave to him, but they didn’t glance back at the same moment.
One-fifteen. She stood alone, staring out over the park and noticing how fresh and green this morning’s rain had made everything. The rain hadn’t stopped her shopping tour, however—she’d found her dress, a blue one for three thousand lire.
She was calm today, not anxious as she had been yesterday. Yet even as she waited she knew he wouldn’t come. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t.
At one thirty-five she walked slowly out of the park and down the street. The rain had scared away the soldiers, no one spoke to her. She walked aimlessly, without a place to go till five o’clock. Fleetingly she thought of her mother whom she’d left in Ancona, of how she’d just gone off suddenly with the lieutenant, not daring to say goodbye. She wondered whether her mother was thinking of her at this moment too, and her throat thickened.
Once far in the distance she thought she saw the bear Giuseppe, but she couldn’t be sure. It was funny, always she was thinking she saw someone she knew—men in uniform looked so much alike.
To escape her thoughts she began to hum “September in the Rain” to herself. She knew some of the words and she sang them softly, becoming again what she wanted to be, a mindless, carefree girl, without past or future.
Like an animal which, having nothing else to do, unconsciously trots homeward, she crossed the Tiber and skirted the Vatican, arriving back in her own small room with the narrow window. She undressed there, thinking how odd to be all alone, to be without a man nearby. Lying on the bed, she saw jeeps and trees and Giuseppe’s head in the stained places on the ceiling.
At five, she thought, I’ll leave Rome for a whole week. What will it be like at my capitano’s base? Where will I live? What will happen to me?
This coming week seemed a long period of time to her. It was gay to go on a trip—fun to ride along the road fast in a little jeep and pass all the carts and wear a hanky around her blond hair and laugh at her serious capitano who always said, “Tomorrow I’m gonna die, baby, so gimme another kiss.”
His friend rode behind them in the jeep, and her capitano drove. His friend was a short swarthy tenente who was always spitting—she tried to ignore him because she didn’t like him, but already he’d pinched her twice when her capitano wasn’t looking and smiled at her meaningfully when she glanced around.
The Italian countryside looked fresh and new; she felt she’d never seen anything so beautiful before. She began to sing in the jeep, singing “September” at the top of her out-of-tune voice.
“She must be feeling good, Mike,” said the tenente from the back seat. “Must like the brand you’ve been giving her.”
Her capitano looked at her. “She’s always this way,” he answered. “She says she doesn’t like to be sad—says she’s always light, always laughing. Funny kid.”
She knew they were talking about her, and she looked sidewise at her capitano and said, “Hello, ba-by. I lawv you ve-ry moch!” Then she put her hand on her capitano’s leg and lay her head on his shoulder.
Was it the growing dusk that made her tired? She closed her eyes and all kinds of thoughts came whirling through her head, she couldn’t stop them. She thought of Giuseppe, not with anger that he’d stood her up, but almost in gratitude that he’d treated her for two afternoons as a lover. Yet in thinking of him she suddenly realized something that hadn’t struck her before. He was only a privato, she thought. He could never have taken me away from Rome for a week, like my capitano. He could never have bought me the dress and the bag, and he didn’t have a jeep. . . . And she saw then very clearly that fate had been kind to her, Maria Consorti, seventeen years old, of Ancona, Italy, who twenty days ago had been a virgin.
III. PFC JOE HAMMOND
“Fountains,” Joe said. They were both drunk. They stood on the far side of the Piazza di Spagna, the fountain in the middle of the square between them and the wide steep steps that reached up to the church. “Let us have a few words on fountains . . . from the Most Reverend Mr. Hunter.”
“I like them,” Burt said.
“The city of fountains,” Joe said.
They weren’t in the leaning stage, they were both just very flushed and warm, content to stand in the middle of the sidewalk for a long period of time and look at one thing carefully and profoundly. At the bottom of the steps over there were flower stands at which people were stopping and buying.
“Flowers,” Joe said, “and fountains. It’s beautiful and it’s sex. Everything in Rome means sex.”
“Flowers don’t mean sex,” Burt said.
“You’re too sober,” said Joe, “and you haven’t read enough Freud. Friend, anything running or just creeping along means sex. Any movement at all, friend—that’s sex.”
“Let’s go. Your brilliance dazzles me today.”
They moved off down Via del Babuino, not doing too bad considering all that anisetta under their belts.
“I feel about ten feet high today,” Joe said. “I feel like there never was an army or a war.”
Burt laughed. “The blonde must have done that to you.”
“The blonde,” Joe said. “That blonde.” He couldn’t stop his heart from pounding, he couldn’t contain the surge of melancholy.
Three Italian sailors with foolish black ribbons hanging from their blue tams passed them on the other side of the street, walking fast.
“You never see them with the girls,” Burt noticed.
“It could be a matter of money,” Joe said. “You don’t buy many meals with three cents a day or whatever they get.”
Far down the street an Italian girl in a bright green dress, very slender and young, with brown hair swishing to her shoulders, was coming toward them, hanging on the arm of a fat pigfaced GI a full head shorter than she. The girl was giving her GI the full business with her eyes until the moment when she noticed the three sailors. Then she let go his arm and stared straight ahead.
“Look.” Burt grabbed Joe’s arm.
The sailors had separated—two of them were crossing the street and the third was almost running.
“What’s going on?” Burt said.
The third sailor had passed the soldier and the girl, but on the other side of the street, and now he too was crossing over. The girl screamed just as the three reached her. She ran into the street but they had her cold, and the fat GI, amazed, was standing flatfooted, an onlooker.
Joe and Burt didn’t hear the two MPs till they ran by. They went in on the scramble of sailors-and-girl, clubs swinging, the girl’s scream bright in the street. Two carabinieri appeared out of nowhere with much flailing of arms and much Italian language. There was a sudden moment of inaction, like a jammed frame on a movie screen, and then one of the sailors tried to break away but the MPs had him. Out of the fray rolled a sailor’s cap, a blue wheel looking for its owner. It was over. Over for the two unconscious sailors on the ground and for the shouting sailor held by the MPs, but not for the two carabinieri, still cursing violently. One of them came in close and kicked a head.
Joe and Burt stayed on their own side of the street but stared over at the girl, wh
o was sitting on the curb sobbing out Italian words they didn’t understand.
“What’s she got in her hand?” Joe asked.
She turned her head at the sound of his voice and Joe felt Burt’s fingers tighten on his arm. “It’s hair!” Burt said. “The kid’s been cropped.”
IV. NINA BONTE
At ten minutes to eleven, seven days of the week, the two steel shutters of the Bar Nazionale, Via Nazionale, Rome, Italy, were raised by Maurizio the busboy, and the soldiers of six United, Allied and Supporting nations began to fill up the place, crowding round in front of Nina Bonte and occupying the eight red steel chairs the bar boasted. The fact that there were exactly eight chairs, not five, not fifteen, was a carefully calculated detail of the Bar Nazionale. The fewer chairs in her bar, Nina Bonte, proprietress and cashier, had decided, the bigger crowd of Rome’s furlough-mad liberators she could pile into it. At the same time Nina thought that the two red steel tables and the eight red steel chairs, though occupying valuable space, gave her establishment a certain tone. She was proud of her bar and proud of herself for the amount of money she made in it every day.
The shutters had already been raised for half an hour this Saturday morning in September 1944. Straddling her high stool, Nina was well into the swing of the day’s crazy routine—grabbing money, making change, shouting to Maurizio to gather glasses from the tables, pouring drinks herself, setting down certain drunken soldiers who tried to grab her across the bar, giving others smiles and wisecracks, saying “Ciao” to civilian friends who wandered through, pointing out customers to her barmen, talking and grabbing and grabbing and talking. And always Nina Bonte’s strong broad hands were filled with lire. Always one hand was in the cash-register making change and the other hand was outstretched with a bouquet of the beautiful money flooding in to her.
Nina Bonte’s whole life was built around these lire. They came from men wearing every kind of insignia: from privates, corporals, leading aircraftsmen, first sergeants, second lieutenants. They came from pilots, snipers, draftsmen, typists, navigators, paratroopers, demolition men, rear gunners, cooks, photographers, tankmen, anti-tank men, radio operators, artillerymen, camouflage artists. They came from citizens of every far city she’d ever read about—San Francisco, Algiers, Liverpool, Dublin, Prague, Hoboken, Glasgow, Winnipeg, Tunis, Marseilles, Melbourne, Chicago. They came from the pockets and wallets of the men whom the newspapers were calling Nina Bonte’s liberators.
Always Nina Bonte took in big lira notes and gave back little lira notes. And as the strega, grappa and cognac went down the soldiers’ throats, the confusion of her mammoth cash-register grew and the ragged stacks of money flooded out onto the counter beside her, even onto the floor. She stuffed it into bags, she made bundles of it with string, she crammed it into a strongbox. Always Nina Bonte’s hands were full, always Nina was talking and grabbing, grabbing and talking, till sometimes she thought she must have every lira note, big or small, that could exist in all Rome.
At one o’clock Maurizio the busboy pulled one steel shutter all the way down and the other steel shutter halfway down, and then Nina Bonte and her two bartenders, Roberto and Alessandro, set about trying to persuade the soldiers to leave. “Polizia militate,” Nina said to them at first, confidentially, affecting good fellowship. And then getting excited and pointing to the AM GOT rules on the wall, she screamed: “Polizia militate! Via! Everybody out! Military police will come!” When the last drunken liberator had been persuaded out of Nina Bonte’s bar, Maurizio slammed down and locked the second steel shutter and began wiping the sticky tables and stacking the chairs.
Nina didn’t move off her stool, her strong body was resting now from the labor of money-making it had gone through. She breathed heavily; dark patches of sweat showed under her arms and small beads glistened on her upper lip. She watched Maurizio raise the shutter again to let in Luisa, the charwoman, a roly-poly girl who always brought her baby along. Luisa put her baby on a chair in the corner and began to mop the floor. The bartenders wiped off the bottles and straightened them on the shelf behind the bar. Nina’s eyes were tired; her lids drooped a little. She wanted to go home and lie down but she forced herself to sit here because she felt that no one could be trusted but herself—and of course her sister Teresa, who worked the five-to-seven evening shift. No telling what might happen to a bottle of liquore if she turned her back.
It was Teresa’s voice on the other side of the shutter. Maurizio raised it again, and Teresa herself, stooping, came through into the dark bar from the glare of the street.
“Hot,” Teresa said, and dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief. “Were you busy?”
“I’m ready for a hospital bed,” Nina Bonte laughed, and pulled her short skirt far above her knees to let in air. “Our liberators got as drunk as ever today.”
Together they counted their take for the noon hour—21,700 lire. They divided the money into groups of tens, fifties, hundreds, five hundreds and thousands, handling it matter-of-factly, not excitedly as they had three years ago when the bar had first come into their possession. They weren’t so young anymore as they had been in those days—Nina out of Rome University only two years, with no experience in managing a bar or managing anything; and Teresa, twenty-two months older, not knowing very much more—though she had worked for a while as an assistant manager in their uncle’s dress shop. But all that was changed now; as they sat side by side at their bar, these two looked grown-up and wise. They were a lot alike: both had short boxy bodies, strong legs and arms, large faces with bobbed hair, big eyes and mouths, and noses that had come down through the centuries to them—straight ample noses starting right at the forehead. Only in temperament were they different: Teresa’s two years seemed to give her a calm and easy-going quality that Nina lacked. Nina was a whirlwind behind the bar, suddenly irritated, suddenly excited, suddenly smiling. Teresa in her turn worked fast and furiously too, but she seemed to plow through the mad mix-up of lire and grasping hands with a certain nonchalance. And yet it was Nina who did the actual managing of the bar, who talked to the Allied and Italian tax collectors and who saw to the buying of the liquor. It was her nervous intelligence which had guided the bar’s prosperity, her facility for picking up languages which had encouraged soldiers to stay longer and drink more.
Their endeavors had already paid off for Teresa to the tune of one architect, age sixty-two, salary fifteen thousand lire a month, who’d declared himself ardently in love and ready for matrimony. Nina Bonte herself didn’t have a fidanzato. Not anymore, that is. The sparkler on her left hand, she had told her interested customers, was from a flier in the Italian Air Force who’d been killed in Africa. Actually she didn’t know what had happened to Paolo since he’d left Rome four years ago. Maybe someday he’d turn up, though she didn’t really worry about it. The past was the past and she could let it alone. The important thing was making money while the making was good. While the liberators were in town.
Nina knew that her father, who’d gone north with the Fascists, would have been proud of his two girls. He had never attended Rome University, but he too understood the nature of the world and the nature of the liberator. . . .
Finished with their counting, they put the taped bundles into their strongbox, waited while the last barman got into his coat and left, and then went out themselves, locking the shutter behind them. Walking fast on their short powerful legs, they’d covered the seven blocks to their home before either had thought of anything to say.
As Nina Bonte ate, sitting at the table with her mother and Teresa, she looked at the fine white American sugar, the American bacon and the American salt and pepper, all of which she’d paid enormous prices for to soldiers, and she felt a certain satisfaction in herself, for being smart enough to know how to make a lira when a lira was around. Someday, she thought, turning her fork into the spaghetti, I’ll retire. The war will be over then and I’ll travel—anywhere I want to. Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia. I’ll have money to
spend, and there’ll be no one to tell me the way to spend it. And I’ll be generous too—it won’t be necessary to save on anything.
She saw herself as a rather grand lady in expensive tailored clothes, made fascinating to men by her independence and her worldly experience. There’d perhaps be a great industrialist—with a castle in the Alps where they’d spend the summer. Long motorcars. Dinner parties in the best restaurants. And she’d visit America and meet a promising young designer of airplanes—or a movie star. She’d make money now and later everything would come to her. Four years ago the eight hundred thousand lire which she possessed would have seemed sufficient for anything she could have dreamed about. But now in inflated Rome it was only a beginning, and she half hoped that the war in Italy would last another year. With the Americani spending like they were, in another year she should have a million and a half lire. She often told herself that though Italy may have lost the war, she, Nina Bonte, was not going to lose it.
After dinner she lay down on the bed with her arms under her head and her legs drawn up. Teresa was washing her face, getting ready to leave for the bar. “I’ll stop by this afternoon,” Nina said. “After the hairdresser’s.”
But she was still lying there a full hour after Teresa had gone. She felt vaguely uneasy. Out in the city at this hour the girls of Rome were parading in the parks and streets, anxious about dinner, ready to make up to any soldier who’d buy it for them. And the more hardened whores were sitting in the bars eyeing up the possible customers, their price of a thousand lire easy on their gaudy mouths. . . . Was she losing anything by working so hard? Were the girls who were walking in the parks and meeting soldiers finding more in their lives than she would ever find in hers?
To drive these thoughts from her mind she got up and combed her hair, washed, and put on another dress, a blue gingham that buttoned down the front. The mirror presented her with the spiderweb wrinkles that had come at the corners of her eyes in the past year, and this only increased her feeling of uneasiness. She went out of the room quickly, kissed her mother and left the apartment.