The Girl on the Via Flaminia

by Hayes Alfred

  “Where?” Robert said.

  “To the hospital for the doctors to examine.”

  “Examine?” he said.

  “To see if she is sick. And if she is sick, then one goes to San Gallicano.”

  “What’s San Gallicano?”

  “A terrible place, Roberto.”

  “And then?”

  “If it is the first time, she is given a small sentence. And cured. And then, later, when she is released, she is given a card. The small yellow card . . .”

  Lisa whimpered. It was a little, terrified, and sickening sound.

  “One gets a card of the professional,” Adele said, looking hard and directly at him. “It is stamped. Officially. And one reports every week. One has to carry it, always. Wherever one goes.”

  “But what if she’s not sick?” he said, driving himself toward all the knowledge. “What if she’s innocent?”

  “When the doctors examine them, there are no innocent girls. Sick or healthy, innocent or guilty they are all given a yellow card. You see? It would be very bad, Roberto, if you and Lisa were not married.”

  So that he had it all now, all the knowledge necessary, everything that was inevitable for him to know, and the vise was completely tight. In the kitchen the coffee had boiled. He saw Ugo come out of the kitchen, carrying four cups and saucers on a tray. He saw the steam ascend from the coffee cups.

  “Adele,” he said, painfully.

  “Yes?”

  “There aren’t any marriage documents.”

  Antonio leaned forward. His face was all profile.

  “What did he say?” he said to his mother. He was almost hissing. “Mamma, what did he say?”

  “None?” Adele asked, not quite believing him.

  “None,” Robert said.

  “Mamma, what did he say?” Antonio said again.

  “They are not married?”

  “No,” Adele said, “they are not married.”

  The boy turned quickly. His face thrust at Lisa. “It’s true, signora? Is this true?”

  Lisa shrank away.

  “Let her be, Antonio,” Adele said. Ugo stood, holding the tray of steaming coffee.

  “Another one!” Antonio cried. “And this one I thought was good! This one I apologized to! This one I praised!”

  “Shut up,” Robert said.

  “Are none of them honest?” Antonio cried. “None to be trusted?”

  “Antonio, she suffers!” Adele said.

  “I suffer too!” Antonio cried. “Whores and thieves!”

  “Adele,” Robert said, thickly. “Get him out of here.”

  “O patria mia!” Antonio cried. “How they dishonor you!” He turned viciously to Lisa. “Did he pay well, the American? Tomorrow you’ll see how well they pay!”

  “Antonio!” Adele said.

  Robert grabbed him. “Get him out of here, Adele, or I’ll knock his teeth out!”

  Antonio pulled himself free. “Whores and thieves!” he cried. He spit on the floor. Narrow-shouldered, belted into that eternal raincoat, he turned and went down the hallway and out of the house, slamming the door.

  Stupidly, his face full of pain and unhappiness, the old man stood with his tray of coffee cups.

  “And you,” Adele said to Ugo, “what are you standing there with the coffee for?”

  Shaking his head, the old man carried the tray into the bedroom and set it on the table.

  Robert stood there. He could feel the sickness inside him. “Adele, what am I going to do?” he said.

  “You? She’s the one will suffer, not you.”

  Lisa moaned. She sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Ah, poveretta,” Ugo said.

  Robert went and knelt down beside her. He put his arm around her shoulders. The sickness was there inside him. The sickness, and something else. A feeling something had finally happened he had not foreseen, and could not have foreseen. Am I responsible? he thought. He had only come through the darkness seeking warmth. He had not wanted to sleep any longer in a room full of soldiers. He had wanted a girl.

  She was shaking with a deeper cold than the coldness of the room. He could feel the shaking of her body.

  “I’ll go to the questura with you,” he said to her. He pushed the hair back from her face. “I’ll go to the questura too. You’re my girl. A guy can have a girl in this goddam country, can’t he? Adele, I can tell them she’s my girl, can’t I?”

  “Of course.”

  “They can’t hold her if she’s my girl,” he said. “They can’t send her to San Gallicano or whatever the name of it is if she’s my girl.”

  Adele did not answer.

  “Can they?” he said.

  “They are afraid of the disease in the city,” Adele said.

  “In the Piazza Colonna last week they arrested a hundred girls on the street,” Ugo said.

  He heard her voice then. It was small, muffled, painful.

  “Adele,” she said.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Why does he hold me, Adele?” she said to the dark tall woman. “Why does he hold me?”

  “Roberto wants to help you,” Adele said.

  Her lips were dry and the shaking did not stop.

  “He is only holding me for San Gallicano,” she said, sitting there on the edge of the bed, and her body shaking. Her hair fell forward, masking her face.

  “He shouldn’t hold me,” she said.

  “But there is no place to go, my dear,” Adele said.

  “There is always a place to go,” Lisa said. “Please, Adele. Tell him not to hold me.”

  “No,” Robert said.

  She struggled. Sitting on the bed, with her hair fallen forward, she struggled. “I said no,” Robert said. Struggling then, she began to cry. The sound of her crying was painful, too. It was a hopeless kind of crying. He watched her tears. He could feel the illness inside himself. What can I do? he thought. What am I responsible for?

  “Idiot!” Adele said. She went to the table. She tasted the coffee. The coffee was cold. Ugo’s face was full of an old man’s sympathy and misery. “Go warm the coffee,” Adele said.

  Ugo picked up the tray again. His head shook. “Che mondo,” he said, going out of the bedroom.

  Adele came forward and stood in front of the bed. There was a look of vexation on her face. Robert noticed how at the corners of her mouth the hair grew, dark and shadowy. “Madonna mia!” Adele said. “What is the disgrace? You crawled into bed together. That should be the least of your sins!”

  Clumsily, Robert stroked her arm.

  “Lisa,” he said.

  “What fools,” Adele said, “what fools I’m lost among! To throw oneself into the river because of the police! If I had gone to the river each time they knocked, I’d be dead and drowned a hundred times! Where is the other fool with the coffee? And you,” she said to Robert. “Now you’ve got her into trouble, take her in your arms. She’s frightened . . . she wants to be Tosca! Take her in your arms!”

  Clumsily, he put his arms about her.

  “Listen to me,” Adele said. “Tomorrow Lisa will go to the questura.”

  “No,” the girl moaned.

  “Yes,” Adele said. “Then we’ll see. What can they do? You crawled into bed together. Ugo,” she called, “must I do everything myself? Come with the coffee!

  “Is she still crying?” Adele said. “Well, let her cry. Tomorrow we’ll have a festa. When she comes home, free, and it’s all nothing, we’ll have a festa. Madonna, they bomb each other, they destroy cities—but a girl in bed is a crime. Here, go away. Let me sit with her.”

  She pushed Robert away.

  “She had to take an American!” Adele said. “With one of her own this would not have happened.”

  11.

  The next day there was hardly any sun, and in another country with another climate it would have snowed. The sky looked like snow, but no snow fell. The day was raw and interminable.

  All the celebrations were ove
r. Behind the billets there were accumulated piles of beer cans and emptied bottles of cognac. It was a new year and the same war. But it was a war far away from this city. The things that happened in the city now were part of the war, of course, no matter how far away the war got. In the failing gray light of the day the gardens looked shabbier than ever. The city had no beauty now. The river had no history. When you stood on one of the bridges and looked at the city, you thought of home, and were depressed, and it seemed, because of the grayness over everything, that this war had been going on forever, and it would never end. In the newspapers there was the continuing crisis of power, and the usual number of suicides and murders, and the schedules of the opera, and a notice of the dedication ceremonies recently performed at a military cemetery. The number of raids upon the bad houses, and the houses of suspected fascists, and the houses of the counterfeiters of occupation money, seemed to have increased. There were divisions fighting in the mountains. Their troops came into town wearing thick sheepskin parkas with lined hoods. At night the officers’ clubs were crowded. At the government buildings the traffic was heavy and the official papers, of all descriptions, and countersigned by a major or a lieutenant colonel, lay in their wire baskets and were eventually transferred to other wire baskets. One lived peculiarly, and only at odd moments did the actual peculiarity of one’s own life become altogether clear.

  Now Robert was lying on the blanket on his cot in the long room in which his company was billeted. The room was in the basement of what had once been a fascist officers training quarters and the closets the soldiers now used had formerly been used by the junior officers of the black shirts and their articles of clothing were all neatly listed on a slip of paper pasted inside the closet door. The company’s cots were evenly distributed down the length of the room, eighteen beds precisely made and precisely blanketed, and a precise three feet apart, with the heads and the feet of the beds alternately turned toward the wall or toward the center aisle, and in front of each bed there was a foot locker, some of wood and some made of old ammunition boxes, and under each bed there was a depressing arrangement of military boots lined up toe to toe, all of them polished, and all their laces knotted.

  On the cots, in fatigues, the soldiers were asleep, with their legs awkwardly apart, and that day’s issue of the military newspaper over their faces, so that only their concealed heads under the newsprint had any actual privacy. Down at one end of the long room, at the moment, the end nearest the door, there was a crap game of about the usual intensity going on, and they were using a foot locker as a backboard for the dice. Now and then the door would open and a soldier, washed, coming from the shower, would enter the room, carrying a khaki towel, and a soap dish, and a comb, looking very scrubbed, and every time somebody entered the room the door would slam, loudly, and the sleepers would stir restlessly under the newspapers, and then somebody would say close the goddam door, and kick it, and the door would close again, loudly, and then somebody else would come into the room, slamming the door too, loudly, and all this time, undiminished, the crap game went on.

  Lying on his cot, the head of which faced the center aisle, and staring at the rather blank door of the closet which had formerly belonged to a fascist officer, and in which the officer had also had, probably, those inspections on a Saturday morning which made all armies only more sinister versions of a boys’ school, Robert went back carefully over all of it. He tried to begin again, as he had done before, with the night he had walked over the bridge, in the cold and the darkness, toward the Via Flaminia. That had seemed like the logical point at which to begin. Now he found, lying there, he could not really begin at that point and the point of his actual beginning moved backward in time. Perhaps it had begun with that gray morning when they had come through the straits of Gibraltar, and the deck had been wet with fog, and down in the hold of the reconverted freighter someone had begun to shout, destroying the last fragments of uneasy sleep, that there was land now, where they had seen for twenty-eight days only water and sky, and he had run up on deck, and there it was: Gibraltar, visible off the port side, like a great tooth coming out of the sea, and the airstrip on the island could be seen, and some low massive sheds that must have been hangars. They leaned then over the rail, in the wetness of the fog, looking at Gibraltar, gray and old and toothlike, and then the infantryman, in his slicker, spitting into the sea, said: “Goddam, it looks better on a Prudential insurance policy.” And then, in the night again, off Toulon, after all the talk about the spies hiding on the Spanish hills, spies he imagined with binoculars and telescopes hidden up there like planted and fixed and sinister landmarks, there had been the air raids, and it was the very first of the experiences for almost all of them on the ship and probably on the other ships, and the very first experience remained longest with you, the very first time you felt afraid, and the very first time you heard somebody’s teeth going in the darkness, and the very first time that that obscene and compulsory praying began, and the very first time you heard how it was somebody else’s ship that had been hit as later it would be somebody else’s jeep or somebody else’s tank or somebody else’s squad, and it was not you. Then, enormous and still intact, the convoy had passed beyond the range of Toulon, and a submarine came up out of the depths of the Mediterranean, and then there had been Augusta, and after Augusta, the straits of Messina, and the land very close now, and very green and old and beautiful, terraced up its quietly sloping hills, with villas on the hills, white and pleasant villas, and after the villas, Naples: her dock all blown apart, and the official buildings and the apartment houses and the hotels knocked full of gigantic holes, and all the glass gone from all the windows, and the queerness of a balcony still hanging mutely to a section of ruined wall, and the queerness of a bedroom all exposed to the air with the fancy wallpaper still papering the wall, and the queerness of a ceiling which still remained and from which still hung the saddest of chandeliers. So that the very first time was the most overpowering because it was all new, and the changes began then, the changes in yourself without your even being aware of the changing as it began, descending the gangplank and lining up by squads on the dock, and marching then, in bulky overcoats, rifles slung, looking at the unfamiliar storefronts and the typhoid signs, and hearing the M.P.s holler at the kids begging cigarettes and selling chestnuts on the Via Roma, and seeing the different troops, Moroccan and Indian and Polish and British, all for the first time, on the narrow sidewalks of the very wounded city. Marching, in formation, under the iron helmets, toward the railroad depot and the freight cars, marked in German and French and in Italian, and then, dumping gun and helmet and pack on the floor of the boxcar, watching the landscape go by as the boxcar rolled, not knowing what destination lay ahead, how close the war was, seeing through the slid-back freight car door the foreign countryside: trees in blossom which were peach trees, and the stone small very old-looking houses, and a garden or a back yard with a scraggy hen pecking in the dirt, and then the ammo dumps, laid out, planned like parks, acres of bombs or shells, long perspectives of oil drums and crated rations, and the point at which it had all begun had probably been there, without his knowing it, a point that led slowly and inexorably to the night going across the bridge toward the Via Flaminia. Because hope and possibility and illusion had begun even then to vanish, and more and more he had let the idea of his own extinction become part of the way he lived, and part of the way he felt, and all the values he put on everything were part of the knowledge and the certainty that he would occupy such a grave as he had passed himself so many times since: earth no higher than the surrounding earth, and the crossed sticks planted in the earth, and a helmet on the crossed sticks, and under the helmet the dog tags hanging, and the rain falling on all of it. Yet he had survived, as they all had here in this room, and they were probably the lucky ones, asleep under their newspapers, or coming wet and shining from the big shower, or shooting dice there on the stone floor, and they had all, probably, at one time or another lived w
ith the fact of their own extinction, and it had changed them, and the point of the beginning of the change, he thought, lying on the cot, must have been that.

  He got up off the cot and went to his locker and took out his soap dish and a towel and a comb. Down at the other end of the room, kneeling, Woods had the dice, and he was trying to get the dice hot.

  “Eight,” Woods said, “and I shoot twenty.”

  “I got five says he can’t,” Cuccinelli said, standing, with one foot on the lid of the foot locker. “I got five. Who says he can?”

  “Eight,” Woods said, “and I shoot twenty.”

  “Five says he can’t,” Cuccinelli said. “Who’s with him? Who thinks he can? Five says he can’t hit eight. Who’s with him?”

  Robert went down the length of the room, carrying his towel and soap dish and comb, and out of the door and into the corridor and there was somebody telephoning in the orderly room and Captain White was sitting behind the first sergeant’s desk reading a copy of Time. In the big kitchen they were feeding the Italian laborers. The laborers stood on line, holding their tin plates, and a grinning boy, an Italian too, in a summer-issue cap, ladled soup out of an enormous boiler into the tin plates. Two slices of bread, very carefully sliced bread, accompanied the soup. Upstairs, in the rear of the building, below the officers’ mess and from which you could see the officers’ billiard room, they were searching those Italians who were not entitled to the soup and the two slices of very carefully cut bread and who were about to depart after the day’s work. The Italians stood, one behind the other, waiting to be searched, with small apologetic and placating smiles on their faces and their arms slightly raised, and a corporal went over them, from their armpits to their thighs, including the women. He imagined that, later, when the Italians remembered the sort of smiles they had worn waiting on that line they must have experienced the kind of a feeling about the corporal that he would not like to have people feel about him. He went on down the corridor to the shower room.