Black August

by Timothy Williams

  He wore soft brown shoes.

  Overhead, the swallows did not seem to notice that the streetlights had come on, but continued to bicker passionately among themselves.

  48: Magnolia

  The neon lights in the concierge’s office were already switched on.

  Trotti and Signor Belloni went past the engraved stones that had been embedded into the walls like stamps in an oversize collection. Through the small doorway and into the courtyard. Their footsteps echoed hollowly.

  The Cloisters of Magnolia.

  A couple of lovers were sitting beside the wall, enjoying the gentle air of the passing day. Despite the late hour, a man in overalls was sweeping the cobbled courtyard. The birch broom moved in regular, short strokes. The man was sweeping away the dust of another long day in the city. Another day without rain.

  Trotti noticed the scent of the magnolia. “It’s a long time since I’ve been here.”

  There was a bench.

  Trotti looked quizzically at the older man.

  Signor Belloni took the newspaper from his pocket and placed it on the stone bench. He then pulled at the creases of his trousers as he sat down. The pale eyes seemed amused. “Commissario, a bank manager is not very dissimilar to a priest. In the course of time, many secrets are confided to a bank manager.” He smiled. “A priest or perhaps a policeman . . . Like Rosanna, I never got round to marrying. But perhaps not for the same reasons as her. It must be a satisfaction to have your own family.”

  Trotti was leaning forward, with his arms now on his thighs. He turned to look at the banker. “Why did Rosanna never marry?”

  The old man gave a bland smile.

  “She was intelligent—she was at one time a very beautiful woman. And she loved children.”

  “You didn’t stay to the end of the autopsy, Commissario?”

  “Why don’t you answer my question?”

  “Why did Rosanna never marry?” The banker laughed and raised his pale hand. “I will answer your question, I swear. But I’m a methodical sort of person. An old maid, I’m afraid.” He paused, then looking about him, said, “This lovely perfume—is that the magnolias?”

  Trotti nodded.

  “Bit late for magnolias, isn’t it?”

  “Marcescent.”

  “What?”

  “Magnolia flowers can wither without dropping off—if the conditions are right.”

  “Marcescent,” the man repeated admiringly. “You’re an educated man, Commissario.”

  “An ignorant policeman,” Trotti said. “Ignorant—but not necessarily stupid.”

  The two lovers had stood up and were now walking away, hand in hand, towards Piazza Leonardo da Vinci and the scaffolded towers.

  “Of course, it could be the girl’s perfume,” Trotti remarked.

  Smiling, the old man watched the young couple leave. “I will tell you about Rosanna, Commissario Trotti. In a way, that’s why I wanted to see you. But in my own time and in my own, old-maidish sort of way.” He paused again. “My brother was twenty-one years older than me—my mother gave birth to Giovanni when she was only nineteen. She was herself a very pretty girl. She started life working as a maid for my father’s family in Monza. The Bellonis were rich—they sold knives—and so for her, marrying my father was a good catch.” Belloni smiled sadly. “If he was alive today, Giovanni would be nearly a hundred. Ninety-five, to be precise. It doesn’t seem so long ago.”

  Trotti did not move. He sat with his elbows on his thighs, his hands hanging between his legs.

  “After Giovanni my mother had several other children but they all died at birth or in the first few months. No prenatal clinics in those days. I think the doctors expected me to die, too. That was in 1916. I feel I’ve disappointed them. As you can see”—Signor Belloni tapped his thigh conclusively—“as you can see, I’m still very much here.”

  “Your brother was Rosanna’s father?”

  A frown. Signor Belloni continued, his hands beside him on the cool stone of the bench, “Giovanni married when he was twenty-six. He married a woman who came from another rich family. An old family that had fallen upon hard times. During the Great War, at a time when a lot of people were building up fortunes—fortunes that are still around—how do you think Agnelli in Turin got to be rich? For all those northern industrialists, the Great War was a windfall—during the Great War my sister-in-law’s people lost a lot of property, much of it in Udine and bombed by the Austrians. Consequently the marriage was a fairly good idea . . . at least for my sister-in-law. The Bellonis from Monza weren’t exactly nouveaux riches—but their money was bluer than their blood. My sister-in-law was an aristocrat—and not much else. She had grown up in a sheltered environment. She had had private tutors until the family could no longer pay for her schooling. She could not cook, she could not sew. Yet Gabriella had one great virtue in Giovanni’s eyes.” The old man paused.

  “One virtue?”

  “She worshipped the ground that my brother Giovanni walked on,” Belloni said and laughed. “Goodness knows why. My brother Giovanni wasn’t a very nice person, I’m afraid. He got out of fighting—Mama wasn’t going to risk both her husband and her firstborn in the war. But in 1919 he came down with influenza—nothing very serious, but people seemed to think that afterwards he was a changed man.” Belloni tapped the side of his head. “The influenza left its mark upon my brother.” He paused. “She was a silly thing, Gabriella. It is funny how history repeats itself. My father married a young girl—and similarly my brother Giovanni married Gabriella when she was not yet nineteen. But there was very little similarity between Gabriella and my mother. My mother was hard. She came from peasant stock and believed that life was cruel. She honestly thought that it would have been a mistake to let us children think that we could expect anything from other people. A hard woman. Love was not the sort of thing my mother had time to indulge in. She was a good woman, but, you know, I can’t once recall her ever kissing me with affection. She’d kiss me—but there was never any warmth. Not because Mama was cold, but . . .” He shrugged. “I suppose because she felt she had to hold herself back. After all, how else can you cope with a succession of miscarriages and stillbirths other than by repressing your true feelings?” In the failing light, the pale eyes looked at Trotti. “Nowadays, your modern psychologists would say a Prussian childhood like mine would inevitably end in homosexuality.”

  The perfume of the magnolias seemed to grow stronger.

  “Perhaps it was the lack of affection that drove my brother to do what he did. Being older than me, it was harder for him. By the time Mamma got around to having me she had no doubt softened a bit. Or perhaps she was surprised that at last one of the children did not end up lifeless and wrapped up in a white cloth.” He looked at Trotti. “Life can be very hard for a woman—much harder than it ever is for us.” He paused for a moment, waiting perhaps for Trotti’s reaction. “It was about the time that Giovanni’s first child . . .”

  “Rosanna?” Trotti asked.

  “It was about the time Rosanna was born—it must have been in 1930. Father died and Giovanni took over the family business. Our father never had any time for the Fascists or Mussolini. In his way, I think father was a poet. A poet and a dreamer. He ran the family business well, but without enthusiasm. He loved to read poetry and I have memories of him shutting himself away in the library and me not being allowed to go anywhere near the old oak door. I can still remember the smell of Papa’s library. He loved Dante—and he loved the Germans, Schiller and Goethe. Papa hated the war—he always said that he had been against Italian intervention in 1915. I scarcely knew him—in those days, there wasn’t the kind of intimacy between parents and children of the bourgeoisie that there was among the other classes. I loved Papa dearly—but from a great distance. So he went off to war, leaving his wife, his two sons and the factory—he didn’t want to go, he loath
ed the interventionists, he loathed D’Annunzio, he loathed the Irredentists. Papa was already over forty, but he felt it was his duty. To his country and to his class. He was with the Alpini and it was at Tremalzo in Trento that he lost his health. He was at the front—where frostbite was as much an enemy as the Austrians. I can remember him coming back. I was only three years old. So handsome, so very handsome in his lieutenant’s uniform. He took me in his arms . . .”

  Trotti waited.

  “When Papa died, I was still a young boy—and anyway, I had no desire to go into the knife business. There was Giovanni and he was a good businessman—like most people from the Brianza. Business is in our blood. Other Italians say we Brianzoli are cheap. I don’t think we’re cheap—it’s just that we know how to drive a good bargain. By now, we Belloni were making swords and knives and bayonets for Mussolini’s imperial army—and doing well. That’s when Giovanni became a Fascist. Out of conviction or out of self-interest, I never knew. More than anything, I think, it was out of a desire for recognition.”

  From Strada Nuova there came the occasional sound of passing traffic—a bus, a taxi, the muffled whine of a Vespa.

  “That’s right,” Signor Belloni said, now counting on his fingers. “Rosanna was born in 1930 and Maria Cristina was born in 194l.” He thoughtfully bit the tip of his tongue. “I think that at first my brother got into Fascist politics because he liked wielding the power and being recognized. He didn’t really believe in any of it. He enjoyed the posturing. He liked the uniform—the tunic and the black shirt that hid his potbelly. And he probably enjoyed the attention he got from all the women. Fascist or not, he certainly did everything in his power to keep me from being conscripted. I was class of ’16—and without Giovanni I could have been sent to Spain or Greece. Or Russia.” He added, “I lost friends in Russia. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been a lot simpler if I had died along with them.”

  Trotti said, “My older brother died in the hills in 1945. He was murdered.”

  “I was lucky. I got a job with an international bank. I was in Rome in ’43 and I managed to move south. I have always been able to speak English—I spent a year at school in London—and so I soon found a job with the Americans. But from what I gather, at a time when I was making a lot of contacts in the south—contacts with people who were soon going to run the new Italy—my brother went berserk. I genuinely believe he went mad. Italy had changed sides and he felt betrayed personally. So once the puppet Republic was set up in Salò, he was determined to get his own back on all those people who had suddenly turned on him when the king removed Mussolini from power.”

  “Where was he?”

  “From what people tell me, he was worse than the Germans. A wild beast, thirsting for the blood of his enemies. You know what the Brianzoli are like. Slow to anger, but once their blood is up, there is no going back. And so . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “They murdered him. They murdered Giovanni. In the January of 1945, my brother was gunned down as he was leaving a brothel in Milan.” Signor Belloni looked at Trotti, an unamused smile on his face. “A year later, my sister-in-law, Gabriella, married again. To a young and charming Partisan leader from the south. She was forty years old and he was just twenty-nine.”

  49: Aprilia

  “He was from the south and in the last nine months of the war he had formed his own group of Partisans. In a way, you can understand Gabriella falling for him. He had those fine dark features that you sometimes find in the south. Beautiful skin. And he was fairly tall. It was only much later that I discovered that he had deserted from the Fascist army not for any noble, political reasons but because he had murdered a man—over a game of cards. And many men of his Partisan group were little better than ruffians.”

  In the deepening blue sky overhead, clouds had turned from pink to an angry red.

  “I’d like to think that Gabriella did what she did out of a desire to keep the knife factory in the family. Perhaps she thought that by marrying a powerful anti-Fascist she could get the Bellonis back into an odor of sanctity. In point of fact, after the war, the factory was confiscated by the young Republic . . . This was of course after the iniquitous referendum on the monarchy. Most of the remaining wealth her new husband managed to squander fairly effectively. On clothes, on women, on horses. At a time when only a few could afford a bicycle, he used to run around in a shining Lancia Aprilia. He had his crowd of friends. Some were old Partisans but most were criminals from the south who had been exiled to Milan. I’m afraid Vitaliano was not a very savory person.”

  “Not a wise marriage for your sister-in-law.”

  “Fortunately for the family, my brother Giovanni had invested much of his wealth in bricks and mortar. And having now qualified as a lawyer—I was working for an American oil company in Milan—I was able to protect some of the possessions from Vitaliano’s depredations. With time, he got more and more demanding. In the early fifties—he didn’t have a job—Vitaliano started to have a serious drinking problem. Once he was drunk, Vitaliano could become very violent. He was violent with his wife—and he was violent with the children. He came from Foggia and he had been married—his first wife died before the war. The two children—nice children, younger than Rosanna but older than Maria Cristina—came to live with Gabriella and her girls. They got on well—perhaps a fear of Vitaliano united them all. There was very little that I could do. For many people, Vitaliano was still a hero of the anti-Fascist war—and we Bellonis were dyed-in-the-wool Fascists. That was my brother’s legacy. I knew Gabriella was unhappy but, as you can remember,” Belloni said, tapping the newspaper spread out on the bench, “there was no divorce in those days. Italy was still a staunchly Catholic country—and married women had to put up with their lot in silence.”

  Trotti said, “You sound like a feminist.”

  He smiled. “I admire women—I admire them for their self-sacrifice. Perhaps that’s why I never married.”

  Trotti raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “To be a man you have to be hard. Hard, reliable and intransigent. That’s what women require of a man—and I don’t think that was the sort of person I have ever wanted to be.”

  “You have to be hard, reliable and intransigent to be a bank manager.”

  He laughed. “I nearly married—a long time ago, Commissario. And in a different city. The young lady went off and got engaged to an English officer with a long nose and a swagger stick. And so in time, I invested my affection elsewhere.” He paused. “That is no doubt why I am so fond of Rosanna.”

  “You think she’s alive?”

  “Commissario, I wouldn’t be wasting your time if I didn’t feel what I’ve got to tell you was useful.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  He held up his hand. “I saw you this morning at the hospital. I wanted to talk to you—but you hurried away with your two friends. You see, I can remember Rosanna mentioning you to me.”

  “Me?”

  “I believe you took her out for a meal on several occasions.”

  Trotti laughed, slightly embarrassed. “She told you that?”

  “She liked you a lot. You were kind. She said that you were lonely, that your wife had left you.”

  “Rosanna and I met once or twice—but there was nothing in it. Friends—I like to think we were friends.”

  “You believe in friendship between a man and a woman, Commissario Trotti?”

  “Signor Belloni, I met your niece at the time of the Aldo Moro affair. I met her for professional reasons. She loved her job. It didn’t take much insight to realize that she loved her job as headmistress because she loved the children. A couple of years later I bumped into her in town—in the underground market, of all places. She was—she still is, I hope—a charming woman. I was living alone, my wife was already in America.” Trotti shrugged. “I invited her out for a meal. We met o
n several occasions after that. But you must understand, I was a married man. I still am.”

  “Do you see your wife?”

  “My wife is now in Illinois—in Chicago.”

  “You see her?”

  “The last time I saw Agnese was when Pioppi, my daughter, got married.”

  “You could always have divorced your wife, Commissario.”

  “Never.”

  “Why not? Times have changed. Divorce is no longer a cause of shame.”

  Trotti unwrapped a sweet and put it in his mouth. “What interest could Rosanna have in an irascible policeman?”

  “She has always spoken well of you.”

  “If Rosanna had spent fifty years not being married, it wasn’t likely that she was going to give up her freedom to marry a divorced policeman. And, anyway, Signor Belloni, to be quite frank, I don’t think that’s what she wanted. Rosanna liked children because she liked people—but I don’t think she was interested in men. At least, not in this man. Not physically. She was kind, good—even very affectionate. But she always gave me the impression of being—of not wanting any physical commitment.” Trotti paused, looked at the banker. “As far as I was concerned, at least.”

  “I understand.”

  “With her, I always felt that I was a big, clumsy male. She was very delicate. When there was physical contact—I don’t know, my hand accidentally touching hers—she would draw back. Like a frightened animal.”

  Signor Belloni said something.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “He tried to rape her.”

  “Who?”

  “Vitaliano—her stepfather. He attempted to rape her. I don’t think it happened more than a couple of times, but it was enough.”

  “What?”

  “It was much later that I found out. Believe me, Commissario, if I had known at the time, I would have killed him. A monster and I would’ve killed him with these hands. I who abhor all forms of violence, I would have murdered him—and without the slightest compunction. It would have been better for us all. Rosanna and I were almost like brother and sister. I am fourteen years older than her but we grew up together in the same house.”