It did not need to be. We might have been shocked by the occupation, stunned like animals who have been startled by a large noise, but we weren’t stupid. It didn’t have to be spelled out. At the hospital the next day, a nurse who lived near Campo di Marte told me she had seen closed trains. Trains made up of carriages like the carriages used for transporting animals, but with human hands waving through the slats.
That evening, just before I left, one of the doctors walked into our tiny staffroom. He told us that since no one knew what was going to happen, all days off, all leave had been cancelled. Then he announced that the Germans had ‘liberated’ Mussolini.
The first announcement did not surprise me, and I suppose after what Enrico had said, the second shouldn’t have. But it did. Hearing Il Duce’s voice on the radio two nights later was like hearing a creature from a nightmare.
Without the possibility of a phone call or a telegram or a letter, I was reduced to hoping that Lodovico would somehow miraculously simply appear. He didn’t. But Emmelina did come back. I had gone to see her on my way to work the morning Enrico left, just as I had planned, and told her that Isabella had been mistaken. Mama’s flu was not contagious, after all. Really, it was just a cold. Overexertion after the excitement of her birthday party.
It was the first time I could ever remember lying to Emmelina, and I knew perfectly well that she didn’t believe me any more than she had believed Isabella in the first place. As I stood in the doorway of her tiny house, shifting guiltily from foot to foot, Emmelina had given me her sideways look, but said nothing. When she asked if we had heard from Rico, I simply shook my head. Then I said I had to go or I was going to be late, and got on my bike and pedalled, my eyes filling with tears because something infinitely precious had been broken.
Emmelina sensed it too. The week that followed was almost worse than not having her in the house at all. She came exactly on time, laid the table and made dinner without comment, and was always careful to close the kitchen door while we were eating, something she had never done before. She did not ask again about Rico, or about Lodo, or anyone. In fact, she barely spoke. There were no whispered conversations in the kitchen. I noticed that the bread knife had been replaced.
Then, one night towards the end of September, she was waiting for me when I came home, standing in her huge black overcoat at the bottom of the hill. I did not have to look to know that she didn’t have her uniform on, or guess that she had not gone up to the house. When she handed me her key, I thought my heart would break.
‘My brother,’ she said. ‘He has a farm near Marzabotto, in the mountains, at Monte Sole.’
I knew about the farm at Monte Sole. I’d heard stories about it, mostly concerning dead animals and accidents. I nodded.
‘Giorgio thinks it’s better if we go there,’ she said. ‘While we can.’
Giorgio was Emmelina’s husband, a thin rail of a man who had a mule and cart and worked as a coal merchant. I knew he had been born in Florence and had barely ever set foot out of the city. I also knew, because she had told me – warning of the dire internecine wars I should be prepared for when I married Lodo – that Giorgio hated her brother with a passion and hadn’t spoken to him for the better part of twenty years. The idea that they would go to sit out the war under his auspices seemed unlikely in the extreme.
I hugged her, breathing in the deep earthy smell of her as if I could keep it forever, and told her that this would soon be over. That I understood, and even agreed, and that they had best go while they could, while the trains were still moving and they might get a pass to get on one. I told her that I would be fine. That we would all be fine, and that I would see her again. Soon. Even as I said it, I knew every word was a lie.
When I finally stopped speaking, Emmelina held my hand for a moment. Then she said, ‘Tell Rico I wish him luck.’
Whether I cared to acknowledge it or not, Emmelina’s leaving exposed a gulf between me and the rest of my family. It had probably always been there, but now somehow it seemed larger. I had been her special child, known in my heart that she had loved me best, and I was angry with them, all of them, for driving her away. But most of all, I was angry with Issa.
The night Emmelina left, I could barely look at her.
Oddly, or perhaps ominously, things became rather quiet at the hospital once the Germans arrived, and at the end of that week. I was given Sunday off. By that last Sunday in the month, 26 September, I had come to terms with the fact that there was no longer any point in hovering beside the radio for reports that might tell me if Lodovico was dead or alive. A part of me still hoped that he might, somehow, appear in time for our wedding. But I no longer thought that I, or anyone else, could do anything about making it happen. In fact, by that time, I doubted that anyone could do much of anything about making anything happen. The news seemed to get worse every day.
The Germans had cooked up a Fascist puppet government, and there was a new Republic of Salo. On the radio we were treated to nightly chants of I believe in the resurrection of Fascist Italy, I believe in Mussolini, followed by that stupid song, ‘Giovinezza’. You were supposed to stand up when you heard it. Il Duce himself ranted over the airwaves with monotonous regularity, and what news we did get from the BBC, which presumably we could now be arrested for listening to, was terrible. The Allies were bogged down in Salerno. It looked possible that Kesselring might, after all, push them back into the sea.
Yet, despite all that, we were having a run of beautiful weather. Silver mornings, followed by blue afternoons and blurred golden evenings. The days spun on, mindless in their sun and shadows, and I decided the least I could do, given the opportunity, was take advantage of at least one of them. Directly after breakfast, a piece of toast which I ate alone in the silent kitchen, I went upstairs, got my paintbox out from its hiding place at the back of my wardrobe, blew the dust off it, and took it down to the terrace.
My parents had given me the paintbox for my fifteenth birthday. I had done well at drawing in school and, although I had no real talent, I enjoyed making little watercolours. I had an album of them. That morning, I decided to paint Mama’s birthday, the old men in their tailcoats and the bright threads of music tangled in the trees.
I had been at it for the better part of an hour when Issa came up behind me.
I wanted her to go away, but she didn’t. Issa had a way of demanding your attention, of absolutely insisting, when she walked into a room or came anywhere near you, that you looked at her. Anger roiled inside me. Churned, like some unruly inland sea. I dabbed at a block of paint with the tip of my brush. Then I stabbed at it, and bent the bristle, and streaked the sky above my picture black.
Issa pulled out a chair and sat down at the table beside me. Without asking, she opened my album and began leafing through my collection of pictures. There were several paintings of Lodovico, none very good. In one, he stood beside a dark-haired woman in a ball gown who might have been me.
Issa studied it for a moment, then she said, ‘Massimo asked me to marry him.’
I didn’t want to be interested in this, or anything else she had to say, but I couldn’t help myself.
‘Massimo?’
The idea of Isabella being married to Massimo struck me as faintly ludicrous. But then again, Aphrodite had married Vulcan.
‘Yesterday,’ she said, although I hadn’t asked. ‘While I was sitting outside the library. He says that I ought to marry him because things are going to get worse. And that he loves me,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘What did you say?’
Issa fingered the edge of one of my pictures.
‘That I don’t love him. No matter how bad things get. That I would never love him.’
There it was, just like that. Cold as a stone.
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. Isabella had had many beaux, none of them, as far as I knew, even remotely serious. She was beautiful, undoubtedly, like our mother, with features so perfect they were al
most a statue’s. But underneath that perfect flesh, there was something hard. For all her laughter, all her game-playing and dancing, I had never seen Issa melt. Not even for a moment. She had a heart, I knew. But she held it close.
‘Was he angry?’
She thought about my question for a moment. Then she shook her head.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Actually, I don’t think he believed me.’
‘Didn’t believe you about what?’
‘That I didn’t love him. I think he thought I was making it up.’
Issa shrugged.
‘It won’t matter,’ she added. ‘He’s gone now, anyway.’
‘Gone?’
Back to Siena to hide on his family’s farms? To Friuli, like Emmelina, if she had gone at all? To Switzerland? Where did people go?
‘Gone where?’ I asked.
Isabella looked at me for a moment, as if she was weighing something. Then she said, ‘To join the partisans.’
Something contracted in my stomach. If I glanced up, I would see the mountains from where I was sitting. I shook my head and pushed the feeling away, concentrating on my picture.
‘Do you mean,’ I asked, as casually as I could manage, ‘the CLN – the Liberation Committee, whatever it’s called?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. Then she added, ‘Well, yes, but not really.’ Issa looked at her hands for a moment, studying the pearly half-moons of her nails. ‘Here it’s called the CTLN, anyway,’ she said. ‘Committee Tuscan. But I mean GAP.’
I put down my brush and looked at her. ‘Issa,’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?’
‘GAP,’ she said. ‘Gruppi di Azione Patriottica. The CLN will direct, coordinate everything. But GAP units will do it. The work in the field.’
I didn’t want to ask what, exactly, ‘the work in the field’ was and the look on my face must have said so.
Issa rolled her eyes. ‘For goodness sake, Cati,’ she said.
A patronizing false brightness rang in her words.
‘You may not realize it,’ she went on, rather pompously. ‘But we have to organize.’
‘Organize?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, animation lighting her face. ‘The University. All of us. That’s what we’re doing. Organizing. For the fight.’
‘The fight?’ I was rapidly coming to hate that term. Hate everything about it.
If Issa heard the derision in my voice, she ignored it. Instead, riding a wave of enthusiasm she must have assumed was infectious, she said, ‘Against the Germans. The Nazis, of course,’ she added, as if I might need the clarification. ‘But the Fascistoni, too. We’re going to have to fight them both.’
‘We?’
She nodded too eagerly. ‘Yes. That’s what the Partisans are doing. They’re forming units, brigades, in the mountains.’
‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘that it would be a good idea to leave “the fight” to the Allies?’
I looked at her. My sister was all of nineteen. Not much more than a child. ‘Who do you think you are, Issa?’ I asked. ‘What role are you playing? Nemesis? This may come as a shock,’ I added unpleasantly, ‘but General Eisenhower just might know more about this than you do.’
Even if I hadn’t already been angry with her, this refusal to grow up, this readiness to treat everything as a jolly version of yet another game or outing with the mountaineering club, infuriated me. Enrico was one thing. He and Carlo were soldiers, after all. They at least knew what they were doing. Issa and her silly friends, on the other hand, had no idea what they were talking about. I doubted Massimo had ever shot anything other than a rabbit, probably with his father’s fancy shotgun.
‘So,’ I said, ‘let me get this straight. These gaps, made up of you and your friends, you’re going to do what?’
‘I told you.’ Issa spoke too cheerfully, as if she was encouraging a stubborn child. ‘We’re going to fight.’
‘We’. That word again. Fear throbbed through me. I laughed as nastily as I could.
‘A bunch of students?’ I said. ‘With pitchforks and rabbit guns? What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Line up against the Third Reich? Take on Hitler’s army?’
Issa looked at me. Then she stood up. The animation had gone from her face. Been replaced by something harder, and much more frightening.
‘Yes,’ she said, and walked back into the house.
By noon, a high scrim of clouds had made things dull. It was still warm, but I no longer felt the heat of the day. A clammy feeling washed over me. I started another picture, this one of Papa, on the terrace, wearing his old white hat and making notes at his table, but gave up when I got to the background. I didn’t want to paint the mountains. Instead, I sat staring at them. I was still staring at them when the first bombs fell.
The Allies always insisted afterwards that they had been trying to hit the train station at Campo di Marte. It was, one would have thought, rather a large target to have been missed so completely, and in the days that followed a sort of sick joke went around to the effect that they must be hard up in America and Britain if their pilots couldn’t even afford glasses. Because, although they did hit a couple of the factories at Refredi, the station was untouched. Most of the bombs they dropped that afternoon fell in piazzas and streets. Where they hit houses. And the children’s hospital.
Of course, I did not know that at the time, while I watched it happen. All I knew was that there was a strange sound, and then, in the east of the city, a flowering of fire.
I rose to my feet, almost hypnotized as petals of smoke blossomed and turned rapidly black, washing the sky like the sky in my painting. This is it, I thought. This is our Turin, our Cagliari, our Grossetto. There, they had bombed the carousel at Easter. And killed the priest while he was giving absolution. And four little girls who were herding geese in a field.
Isabella came running out onto the terrace.
‘Bombs,’ I said stupidly, without looking at her.
It occurred to me that neither of us had actually seen a bomb explode before. Not that it mattered. I knew exactly what this was. I recognized it the way you recognize things in dreams. ‘They’re bombing us.’
Issa gripped my shoulder, her fingers digging into me. I put my hand over hers. From the terrace, we could see black specks of planes. Several explosions came, very close together. And there must have been sound, but the strange thing is, apart from the first droning, I don’t remember it. Then, finally, the afternoon was split by a high, repetitive whooping sound.
Later, I would recognize it as an air raid siren, the signal that was supposed to warn us. It began almost as soon as the last bomb fell.
‘Come on,’ Issa was saying. ‘Hurry! Hurry up!’
She had begun dragging my arm, pulling me across the terrace towards the house. I looked at her. Something was shaking. At first I thought it was the earth, that the whole city was rippling in the aftermath of the explosions. Then I realized it was me.
‘Cati!’ Isabella shouted. She took both my shoulders and shook me, hard. ‘You have to go to the hospital!’
I stared at her. I started to say I wasn’t hurt. And then, as if her shaking had rattled something loose in my brain, I understood.
In the next moment we were running – through the house, out of the front door, to the shed where we kept our bicycles. I had pulled mine out, and was about to get on it, when I stopped and shoved it at Issa, forcing her to grab the handlebars.
‘Mama!’
I started to dart towards the house, but Issa lunged and stopped me.
‘She’s in the cellar, with Papa. They put supplies down there a week ago.’
I looked down at her hand grasping my dress and noticed that something was wrong.
‘My uniform.’ The words came out as a mumble, the kind of muttering you hear crazy people making in the street. ‘My armband.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Isabella thrust my bicycle towards me. She said somethi
ng else over her shoulder that I couldn’t hear and then, before I realized what was happening, she was gone, and there was nothing for me to do but follow her, out of the drive, down the hill and through the Porta Romana into the city.
By the time we arrived at the hospital, the first ambulances had come in. There were people running everywhere. Issa shouted something to me about a civilian defence group and pedalled away. I didn’t have time to wonder where she had gone. The moment I dropped my bicycle, a sister grabbed me by the arm. There was a woman holding a little boy. It took us the better part of ten minutes to convince her to let us look at him, to prise him out of her arms and discover what his mother must have known all along, that he was already dead.
The children’s hospital was not far away, and we got most of the casualties. Two nurses who had been trying to evacuate a ward that took a direct hit died in the corridor because we couldn’t get them into an operating theatre. There were babies screaming in bassinets. A little boy on crutches was looking for his father. A small girl with cuts all over her face was clutching a stuffed rabbit. And then the parents began to arrive, entire families looking for their children and grandchildren. One man ran up and down, a napkin still tucked into the front of his shirt, because his family had been eating Sunday lunch in Scandicci when a neighbour came running in and told them that the hospital where his daughter had had her tonsils removed the day before had just been bombed by the Allies.
The strange thing was that during all of that, as hellish as it was, I was not afraid. Standing on our terrace, I had been terrified. Literally rooted to the spot with fear. If Isabella had not dragged me, I doubt I would have moved at all. I probably would have stood there all afternoon and all night, shaking and staring like an idiot. But once I got to the hospital, once I had something to do with my hands – the fear fell away. It shattered like glass. And was replaced by a kind of nothingness. My fingers moved by themselves. My mouth spoke. My brain clicked and whirred. It chose the right instrument, moved methodically from one task to the next. During it all, if I had a thought, it was only this: Thank you General Eisenhower, Thank you Mr Churchill, if this is how you set us free.
The Villa Triste Page 4