The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

‘Caterina?’ The signet ring he wore on his left hand next to his wedding band caught the light that seeped through the half-open curtains.

  ‘I’ve been trying to find Lodo.’

  I wasn’t sure the words actually came out of my mouth. If they did, they were not much more than a whisper.

  Papa closed the door and came into the room. He smiled, but sadness blurred his face. He leaned down and took the telephone out of my hand. My father replaced the receiver gently in the cradle, then he placed his hand on the top of my head, stroking the snarled tangle of my hair that had long since escaped its pins and the tortoiseshell clasp I had tried to tame it with.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If we don’t hear from him tonight, we’ll get word of him tomorrow.’

  I closed my eyes, my head resting against Papa’s hip. The linen of his suit scratched against my cheek.

  ‘Papa,’ I said finally.

  ‘Yes, my love?’

  ‘Are the Germans coming?’

  ‘They’re already here.’

  I knew I sounded like a child, like anything but a twenty-two-year-old woman who was about to be married, but I couldn’t help myself. I looked up at him.

  ‘No, I mean here,’ I said. ‘To Florence. Do you think we’ll be occupied?’

  For what seemed like a long time, my father didn’t answer me. Then he said, ‘Yes, Cati. I should think we will.’

  That evening Isabella and I stood between our parents and greeted our guests as they arrived. Supper was served on the terrace by the women who had come in, all of them now in starched white aprons that Emmelina had found from somewhere. Then, just before eight o’clock, the musicians stopped playing, champagne was poured, and everyone moved into the sitting room to crowd around the big radio and listen to what we all already knew the Prime Minister was going to say. That the Italian government had asked the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, General Eisenhower, for an armistice, and that the request had been accepted.

  There was dead silence as Badoglio spoke, his voice wavering from the radio. As a result, he said, Italian forces would immediately cease all acts of hostility towards the Allies.

  Then, the BBC announced that the Italian navy had been ordered to sail its ships immediately to the nearest Allied port. Issa was standing beside me. She reached out and gripped my hand.

  The quartet we had hired were four old men, their tailcoats and white ties impeccable and shiny with age. Not that you would have known it, because after the radio announcement the music became quite wild. High and fast, it was like Gypsy music, flung from the strings in bright unravelling spools. Champagne corks popped. Down the hill in the city, the bells began to ring. A few minutes later, fireworks went off. Standing at the terrace wall, I watched the livid colours spiralling upwards, snagging in the branches of the garden trees and tangling in the smatter of stars.

  It was well past midnight before the terrace finally emptied and nothing was left except tables covered with crumbs and empty glasses. A few of Papa’s friends, colleagues from the University, had stayed on. As I went up, I paused on the stairs, listing to their voices rise and fall, lapping like waves from behind the closed door of his study. Part of me wanted to turn the handle and slip through into the safe, grave world of men’s voices and cigar smoke. My father had always made me welcome, had always allowed any of us to join in his conversations. I paused. Then I realized I was too tired, and slipped my shoes off and crept upstairs.

  The curtains over the window at the end of the hall had been pulled, but light still seeped under my door. I pushed it open, realizing I must have left the lamp on the dressing table on, and almost tripped over Isabella’s dress. She had shed it like a skin. Dropped it on the floor, then drifted into my bed. The covers were pulled up almost over her face. A floss of hair spread across the pillow.

  Standing there holding my shoes, I didn’t have the energy to be angry. Issa had done this when she was a child, floated from her bed to mine as if there were no real difference between the two. At least tonight she had left me some space. I bent down and picked up the dress. It was her favourite, an iridescent blue shot with green. The silk came from Como. Mama picked it out. The bolt she chose for me was copper-bronze. With my skin, Mama said, with my hair, I couldn’t wear green. Even blue, I should beware of. My colours were autumnal. Bronze, copper. Occasionally, scarlet. I hadn’t said anything, but I didn’t like my dresses. I didn’t want to wear the colours of dying leaves. I, too, wanted to be a dragonfly.

  Smoothing the skirt, I eased open the wardrobe and slipped the dress onto a hanger. Then I opened my bureau drawer, and saw that Issa had helped herself to one of my nightgowns. My trousseau was locked away, otherwise she would probably have rifled that, too. Belongings didn’t really exist for my sister. She simply picked up what she liked.

  Looking at her nestled in my bed wearing my nightgown, I wondered if Isabella would ever be forced to grow up. Probably not, I thought. Probably she would be one of those people who lived forever with the special privileges allowed to youngest children – the charm and skills bred of indulgence. It was a joke in our family that Issa could get away with anything.

  I was brushing my hair when I felt her watching me. I looked in the mirror.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  I put my brush down. Then I stood up and pushed open the window and closed the shutter.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Move over.’

  She wiggled sideways and I climbed into bed. I threw my head down on the pillow and yanked the blanket. Issa waited a moment, then she yanked it back and laughed. High and bright, the sound sparked the darkness.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, she was gone. I lay in bed feeling the echo of her in the room and watching the slats of sunlight slide through the shutters. I’d been dreaming of Lodovico. I’d heard his voice. Seen him smile. As I woke up, he was walking towards me in his officer’s uniform. I closed my eyes and tried to summon him back, to feel the touch of his hands. Then I remembered, and leapt out of bed. The Allied port.

  Downstairs, the debris of the party was still scattered about – dirty glasses, cigarettes stubbed out in ashtrays. I glanced at the hall clock. It was past nine on a Thursday morning. Papa and Issa would have left for the University ages ago. From behind the kitchen door, I could hear a dim murmur of voices. The radio. I skirted the dining-room table, and pushed through the door.

  My mother was standing in the middle of the room. Like me, she was still wearing her dressing gown.

  ‘Mama?’ I asked, my eyes straying to the counter where the radio sat. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’

  All of us, Issa, Rico, and I, had learned over the years that our mother was not someone to turn to for reassurance. That Papa was the one who could be relied on to chase monsters from under the bed and thwack through the bushes, proving that Count Dracula was not, in fact, at the bottom of the garden.

  Mama looked from the radio to me.

  ‘The Allies have landed at Salerno.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Late last night. Early this morning. It’s still going on.’

  So, it had happened. I sat down suddenly, the kitchen chair rocking with the motion.

  As the voices had been lapping to and fro in Papa’s study, as I had been yanking the blanket with Issa and dreaming of Lodovico, the invasion – the real invasion – had begun.

  After university, I had begun training as a nurse. But my skills were still not such that I was in much demand at the hospital, and it had not been much of a problem to get two days off for Mama’s party. So once we had recovered from the news, and Emmelina arrived, with her niece in tow to do the ‘heavy work’, I spent my day half helping to tidy the house, but mostly hovering around the telephone. I still could not get a line, and no calls came in. Mama and I were like cats on hot bricks, starting every time we heard something in the street, darting to the windows in case it was Enrico or Lodo or someone with a telegram. But the only people who came
were the men who folded up the tables and took away the chairs. For the most part, they were morose and silent. Whereas yesterday people had been jubilant, even giddy, now a watchful, almost sullen, mood had set in. All day long, the radio babbled.

  Papa and Isabella finally came home, much later than usual. As we sat down to dinner, they recited the news of the day. But by then Mama and I had already heard it. The Germans had moved faster than anyone expected. In little more than twelve hours they had occupied Padua, Bologna, Verona. Milan would be next. Then us.

  No one knew what was happening in Salerno, exactly, but Papa had spoken to colleagues who insisted they could hear the guns from Rome. Everyone expected another landing, possibly at Ostia, or even farther north – on the Argentario, or at Livorno. Badoglio and the King apparently really had vanished, signed the armistice and fled Rome. Despite his best efforts, Papa had not been able to find out anything more about the navy. There was no news about the movement of specific ships. He had not been able to get a line to Naples, nor had he been able to get any news of Enrico. Rumour said that the divisions based around Rome would attempt to defend the city, but as the country appeared to have no government, no one knew who would be in command.

  On hearing this last piece of information, Mama, who had left her plate untouched, got up from the table abruptly. From the sitting room we heard the snap of the bar door, the clink of a glass and a bottle. After that, Papa stopped talking and pushed his food back and forth. I cut a potato into pieces, smaller and smaller and smaller. Only Isabella ate, methodically and without speaking, like a horse.

  She was, she informed me after dinner, going out with a group of her friends, to a ‘meeting’. When I asked her what it was about, she shrugged and said, ‘nothing’. Which I suspected meant a visit to one of the cafes around San Marco. I had joined these outings once or twice. But most of Issa’s friends were from the University mountaineering club – she shared that particular passion with both my father and my brother – and on the whole, they were rather too hale and hearty for me.

  ‘Answer the door, will you?’ Issa said. ‘If Massimo comes? I just need my coat.’

  ‘You’re going with Massimo?’

  We were standing in the hall. She shrugged as she started up the stairs. ‘We all are,’ she said. ‘He has a car.’

  And petrol to put in it, I thought. I had met Massimo once or twice. He was a year or so ahead of Issa at the University – in engineering, which was presumably how he had got out of being sent off to die for his country. His family came from somewhere around Siena and owned land, rather a lot of it. He was a beefy fellow, loud and opinionated, with a rather self-conscious booming laugh. The others had treated him with a certain amount of awe. I suspected he was used to getting what he wanted. Including petrol.

  The doorbell rang, and I opened it obediently, wondering if Papa knew what Issa was up to.

  Massimo stood on the doorstep with his hat in his hand. He looked rather more subdued than I had remembered him. At least he’d cut his mood to suit the occasion.

  ‘Caterina.’ He took my hand as I invited him in, standing half in the open doorway. Behind him I could see the shape of a car in the drive, and hear voices rustling in the warm night.

  ‘I hear,’ Massimo said, giving a little bow, ‘that congratulations are in order. A doctor?’

  He said this as if I had just bagged an excitingly large deer.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your fiancé is very lucky.’

  ‘Thank you. He’s in a very dangerous position. As an officer,’ I said suddenly, sounding prissy, even to myself. ‘In the navy.’

  I don’t know why I added the last remark, probably to highlight the fact that Massimo wasn’t – in the army, or the navy, or anything else, except the mountaineering club. And was therefore in no danger at all from anything, except possibly twisted ankles.

  If he heard the insult, he was gentleman enough to ignore it. Instead, he smiled again and said, ‘Then he matched his good taste and courage in choosing someone as beautiful as you.’

  I blushed, feeling as badly as I am sure he intended me to. And probably as I deserved.

  Massimo had extravagantly lashed rather pale eyes. Just then, they flicked away from me, over my shoulder, to Isabella who was coming down the stairs.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and Massimo’s charm, so evident moments before, deserted him. Looking at her, he was simply tongue-tied.

  Issa shrugged into her coat, although the night was warm.

  ‘I won’t be late,’ she told me, although I hadn’t asked. Then she slipped past Massimo and down the steps, and they were gone.

  Later, as I dried the dishes, Emmelina whispered to me that she had heard the city prisons had been opened. Cut-throats and murderers, she said, were on the streets. Prisoners of war and who knew who else. It was, she assured me, impossible to buy a lock, or even a piece of chain or stout rope. There were none left in the shops. In all likelihood we would not have to worry about the Germans because we would all be slaughtered in our beds well before they arrived. She hoped I was going to lock my door and windows. As she left for home an hour later, I saw what I recognized as the tip of one of our bread knives sticking out of the folds of her big black coat.

  I didn’t put much stock in the story – although it turned out to be perfectly true – if only because it was the sort of thing Emmelina loved. She had been working for us since shortly after Enrico’s eighth birthday when I was five.

  Every afternoon, Emmelina had collected us from school, and entertained us while walking home with some dire tale or other, usually featuring automobile accidents or train wrecks. It was Emmelina who had invariably bandaged my scraped knees when Enrico pushed me over. Who had sat with me over countless cups of hot milk at the kitchen table while I related to her all the adventures and dramas of my days.

  After she had gone that night, I felt suddenly bereft. Papa was in his study. I knew I could interrupt him, but I had nothing, really, to say. And he would be getting ready for a lecture. I went upstairs instead to check on Mama. The door to my parents’ room was ajar, the lamp on the bedside table on. My mother was curled on the bed asleep, the picture of Enrico she kept on her dressing table beside her on the pillow.

  Mama’s grandfather had made a fortune in mining. Marrying our father had been considered a romantic concession to love, but one she could afford. We had a gardener who came twice a week, and a man who helped with the car. When Rico and Issa and I were very small there had been a nanny, who had eventually been replaced by Emmelina. Until not long ago there had been a live-in maid. Now, with Enrico in the army, me at the hospital, and Papa and Issa at the University all day, the phalanx of people who had surrounded my mother had dwindled. On most mornings, she was left alone until Emmelina came just before lunchtime.

  I don’t know if I considered whether or not she was lonely, but I had noticed that she had developed the habit, when she thought no one was watching, of running the tips of her fingers over the surfaces of our furniture, as if she could read their history like braille. A desk that had belonged to my great-uncle. The chair that my grandfather had been sitting in when he died. It occurred to me that when we were gone she must drift through the too-big house, picking up traces of ghosts and playing the piano while she waited for the day to unravel.

  My mother was not an unkind woman; she was not even what could be described as ‘cold’. It was simply that she had made it clear, from the time we were very small, that she had a single reservoir of love, and that it belonged to Enrico. I don’t know what my father felt about that, other than a vague sort of sadness, but Issa seemed to have decided some time ago that she did not care. I was not so lucky, not so good as my sister at being impervious. I reached for the blanket folded at the end of the bed and slid it over my mother, gently tucking it in at her shoulder.

  Downstairs, I wandered into the sitting room and picked up the telephone again, imagining that somehow I would hear Lodo’s voi
ce. That he would tell me to put on my best dress because we were going dancing. Or say that he’d call for me in half an hour so we could walk down to the bridges and watch the lights on the river. This time, however, not only was there no voice – no promise of dancing or kisses in the dark – there was not even a reassuring hum or click. There was nothing on the line at all. Just silence. We had been cut off.

  I replaced the receiver carefully, suddenly afraid of making a sound. Through the glass doors, I could see the empty terrace and beyond the balustrade, the city below. Crouched in its valley, it looked like a huge animal holding its breath.

  I slept badly, heard Isabella creep along the hall some time after midnight, and left early for the hospital the next morning. Despite my fractured dreams – filled with the sound of cars, and Lodo’s voice mingling with my father’s and Massimo’s – I was glad to be back in my uniform and out in the new light. I cycled fast, allowing myself the fantasy that perhaps the Germans would simply decide to go somewhere else. Or that the landing at Ostia, or even Livorno, would happen today and it would be the Allies instead who came marching down the Lungarno bestowing cigarettes and chocolate cake.

  The illusion was pleasant but fleeting. When I arrived, I found the ward I had been assigned to in chaos. Explaining anything to junior nurses was not a priority at the best of times, and it took me almost half an hour to get someone to stop rushing about long enough to tell me what was going on.

  Some time during the night it had been decided that we should make a complete inventory of everything – all supplies, medication, linens – and then pack away and hide as much as we could reasonably manage in the cellars, the isolation ward, even the morgue. A rumour was going around that the Germans, on taking control of Bologna and Verona, had requisitioned all hospital supplies and sent them to their own medics at the front. There were no swastikas hanging outside the Palazzo Vecchio yet, but the Director thought we had, at most, twelve hours. After dithering through yesterday, complete panic had broken out.