by Angela Petch
She passed a blue sign indicating the village of Tramarecchia and descended a steep, stony track wide enough for a vehicle. There were fresh tyre marks in the mud. Beneath her she saw a huddle of stone houses built around a small grassy square, and in the middle a series of three traditional rectangular water troughs used in the past by women to do their washing. She wondered how many conversations had been exchanged at these places, how many secrets and sorrows.
The front door and window frames and shutters of the square house were painted bright red, and it was from behind here that the voices were coming. She had believed the hamlet to be uninhabited and, curious, she made her way to the back of the house. A very old man, no taller than five foot, had his back to her as he pruned a fig tree. His companion, a blonde of about forty, steadied his ladder. She spoke Italian with a foreign accent and Alba guessed she was Eastern European, and most likely his carer. So many families needed help nowadays with the elderly. Whereas in the past members of the extended family would take turns to keep an eye on their loved ones, today families were smaller, and scattered. There was little work in the area for youngsters and they moved away.
The woman was urging him to be careful, not to fall or cut himself.
‘Oh, Tanya, Tanya, I could do this in my sleep. If you only knew the work that I have done in the past…’
‘Buongiorno,’ Alba said.
They turned to her in suspicion and mumbled an uninterested buongiorno in response.
‘Is this Tramarecchia?’ she asked.
‘Sì.’ They stared at her coldly.
‘What do you want?’ the old man asked abruptly. And then she recognised the elderly man who had joined them on Christmas Day.
‘Ciao, signor Massimo. Don’t you remember me? You came to our house – I’m Alba. We’ve already met.’
‘Ah, mi scusi, signorina. Of course,’ he said, slowly climbing down the ladder. ‘Without my glasses I can’t see far. Mi scusi, mi scusi.’ He came over and grasped her hand. His grip was surprisingly strong. ‘But what are you doing in our little hamlet?’
‘I’m helping Egidio at the tourist office. He has a project about ruins in the area and I’m exploring.’ She took in a couple of dilapidated houses and the crumbling wall of a house long gone. ‘Do you mind if I sit for a while and draw?’
The old man laughed. ‘Eeee! Why here? You should go to Sansepolcro and draw the monuments down there.’
The woman said, ‘Don’t be rude, Massimo. Let her be.’
‘But if Egidio has asked you, that’s fine. He’s a good man. And, you’re not a robber,’ Massimo said.
‘No, I’m definitely not a robber,’ Alba said, thinking to herself that there couldn’t possibly be anything to steal here.
‘Somebody managed to remove a heavy wardrobe from Robertino’s old place,’ the elderly man told her, pointing to a neighbouring house that was locked up. ‘I was going to put bars at my windows, but then I thought it might attract thieves. There is nothing precious in my house.’ He paused before adding, ‘Except my memories.’
‘The ruin over there,’ Alba said, pointing to an old tower, ‘what is it?’
‘An old watchtower.’ The old man took her arm and guided her to the edge of his plot, strangled with nettles and couch grass, and pointed to a village on the opposite peak. ‘Up there is Montebotolino. That’s where you should go and draw your pictures. It has an ancient church and the remains of a castle. The people of Tramarecchia were enemies of Montebotolino, and they built this tower to spy on them.’
‘I know Montebotolino well,’ Alba said. ‘My step-grandfather lived there, and I often slept at his house when he was alive. Did you know Danilo Starnucci? He was also known as Capriolo.’
A smile transformed the old man’s face and he grasped Alba’s hand, shaking it firmly. ‘Danilo’s granddaughter, eh! But, why did nobody tell me? He was a good man, a brave partigiano, one of the best.’ He kissed Alba’s hand. ‘I am proud to know a relative of Danilo Starnucci.’ He turned to the woman at his side. ‘Tanya, do we have any of that Vin Santo left in my kitchen? This calls for a celebration.’
‘Any excuse,’ Tanya laughed, and disappeared through the back entrance of the red house.
To Alba’s utter astonishment, Massimo started to speak to her in almost perfect English. ‘I remember the story well about your nonno Danilo finding his inglesina, his English daughter.’
‘You speak English?’
‘Yes, I speak English.’
She looked puzzled. ‘But why didn’t you tell us when you came on Christmas Day?’
‘Nobody told me you were Danilo’s family. When Tanya returns with the Vin Santo, I shall explain why I know English… if she hasn’t drunk it all in the kitchen first.’
Tanya reappeared with three plastic tumblers of sweet fortified wine.
‘Any relative of Danilo’s is welcome at my house any time,’ Massimo said.
‘You’re speaking inglese again, Massimo,’ Tanya said. She turned to Alba. ‘I don’t understand a word. He uses it when he wants to be stubborn or if he’s angry and feels like swearing.’
Turning to Massimo, she said, ‘I’ll leave you with this signorina for ten minutes and go for a walk to the river. Then you can talk in your inglese. Behave, now!’ She wagged her finger at the old man, and he waved her off with an English ‘Goodbye.’
When she was a few metres away, he said, ‘She’s not a bad girl, and I’m lucky she accompanies me here so I can visit my old house, but she talks too much. I don’t want to hear all the details about her family back in Kiev. I prefer silence. In the care centre in Badia there is too much tittle-tattle, too many bells to tell us about mealtimes, times for Mass, time to go to bed. They even tell me when to pee. Bloody hell,’ he swore in English, and Alba laughed.
‘I think your English is better than mine,’ she said. ‘My stepmother tries to get us to speak in English as often as possible, but Italian is my first language.’
‘Do you mind if I speak in English?’
‘Of course not. But why do you speak it so well?’
‘I ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Suffolk, so of course I speak inglese.’
‘Really?’
‘The British captured us very early in the war, in Libya, in 1941 and imprisoned us in a place called Mersa Matruh, in Egypt. The war took me halfway around the world, you know. That was enough travelling for me for one life.’
‘I’ve never been to Africa, but my father has. He worked there when he was young.’
‘Was he in the desert like me?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘The desert could be beautiful. When the weather was calm, the sand was golden and like a furrowed field. I remember coming across a single desert flower one day, and there was an oasis, shimmering in the sun, and the sky as blue as ours.’ He gestured to the sky, clear today. ‘But when the storms blew the sand around, it got everywhere. Our tents flapped as if they would fly away, and sand got into our mouths, ears, nostrils and everything tasted of the stuff. Bah!’
He paused for a few seconds, as if his mind was back in 1941, and she waited patiently for him to continue. In the distance, from the meadows below Montebotolino, she could hear the bells from Chianina cattle grazing on the new spring grass.
‘And all that was without having to contend with the war,’ he said after a while. ‘I’d gone to Libya on military service in 1939 before Italy joined the war, and it wasn’t too bad then. We had food shipped out to us at the beginning: olive oil, pasta, our vegetables, vacuum-packed and dehydrated, because nothing grew in that parched land. They even sent bottled water. Being by the sea, we went swimming in our free time. I was only seventeen. It seemed like a holiday to me, but then the war came.’ He stopped.
‘Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to, Massimo,’ she said.
‘I don’t mind, signorina Alba. If you don’t mind listening to an old man.’
‘I love hearing about the pa
st.’
‘When flares lit up the sky at night, I tried to pretend they were fireworks, but of course they weren’t. We were on the front line, our artillery always under attack. We learned very quickly that our equipment was inferior to the Allies’, and on the second of January 1941, we were taken prisoner.’
‘You remember the date so precisely.’
‘It was the day after Capodanno, but how could we celebrate New Year? We were exhausted, our supplies had stopped coming and we had no water. The only thing we had plenty of was cigars and cigarettes.’
He pulled out a packet of Marlboro and offered one to Alba, which she declined. After he’d lit up and taken his first puff, he said, ‘In many ways, I was pleased to be rescued from those conditions. And I know my comrades felt the same. I’m not ashamed to tell you that.’
‘Were you treated all right?’
He paused before answering. Alba wondered if he was sifting through bad memories.
‘We were walked for two days and two nights to Solum,’ he said eventually, ‘and then put on a ship for another night until we reached Alexandria. Then Port Said, and eventually Johannesburg. By then, we were five or six thousand. That was the beginning of prison for me for the next few years. I started off in a tent for twenty months in South Africa, after the guards had taken our clothes to burn. We were full of fleas and lice and they dipped us like sheep into disinfectant, and made us stay naked for twenty-four hours. We roasted under the sun and shivered in the freezing night. Then we were issued with clothes patched with bright colours, to show we were prisoners. Each day we were given half a litre of water and a handful of boiled maize. One of the prisoners tried to drink camel urine, he was so thirsty, but I never tried that.’
Massimo paused and stared into the distance.
‘I finished my war in Suffolk, where conditions were better. So, you can maybe appreciate why I love to come here to my own place in Tramarecchia. Freedom is precious, Alba.’
‘I can’t believe what you’re telling me, Massimo, in the middle of the Italian countryside, in this tiny hamlet. What a story!’
‘I was a very young man when I left here, Alba, but I felt one hundred years old when I returned.’
She looked at his wizened face, thinking back to Christmas Day; how she’d thought he was a frail old man with nothing much to talk about.
‘Would you mind if I sketched you sitting in front of your house?’
‘Of course not, my darling. Just make me look young and dashing, and give me more teeth,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Once upon a time, I was handsome.’
It was his hands she concentrated on. Tiny but strong, the fingers blunt, nails cracked and hardened from years of work. While she sketched, he told her how the English had been good to him, despite it being wartime.
‘The couple I worked for were elderly. They’d met each other when they were in their late fifties and they had no children, so by the end of my time there, I was like the son they never had. In fact, Mr and Mrs Spink asked me to stay on in Suffolk at the close of the war to work on their farm, but I couldn’t.’
She sensed regret in his voice. ‘Was that a difficult decision, Massimo?’
She pencilled in details of the fig tree growing up the side of his house and a bucket planted with flat-leaf parsley by the back step.
‘I had a girl in Suffolk who was sweet on me. Her name was Molly,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘But I had a sweetheart back here, too, called Lucia… and I came back for her.’
‘Were you a bit of a ladies’ man?’ Alba teased.
His mood had changed from the twinkly humour of earlier. ‘Perhaps I will tell you all about it another time.’
Massimo looked tired, and she didn’t want to put strain on the old man. ‘I’d love that.’
‘Come and visit me at the care centre in Badia. I’m not often able to come here, unfortunately. It depends how busy Tanya is.’
‘Maybe I could bring you myself? If I borrowed Babbo’s car.’
His face lit up again. ‘Here comes Tanya. Maybe she can sort it for us.’
Before the pair left to go up the track to wait for the comune minibus to take them back to the centre, Tanya took Alba’s mobile number and promised to get back to her about arrangements.
‘You will have to come in and check with the manageress,’ Tanya said, ‘but I’m sure it will be fine. In fact, it will spare me from coming here, and it will do Massimo good. He’s always happier when he’s here, aren’t you, my love?’
She linked arms with her charge and Massimo reached for Alba’s hands to squeeze them. ‘See you soon.’ He sang the lines from an old English war song: ‘“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…”’ and Alba smiled.
She stayed another quarter of an hour, wandering around the ruined hamlet, drawing details of an old lamp, a step worn from the tread of hundreds of feet, an old door, the green paint flaking off to reveal brown underneath, a rose bush sprouting its first tight, scarlet buds. She tried to imagine the place busy, with children playing in the little square, women singing at the fountain while washing clothes or sprinkling grains of maize for the chickens that scratched around. But the pictures wouldn’t come, and the only sound was the wind as it played with the trees, their branches in need of pruning after years of neglect.
Packing up her pencil and pad into her rucksack and zipping up her jacket, she walked home, lines of light from the setting sun glinting through the branches of the coppiced beech on either side of the path.
It had been a good afternoon. The paths she was treading were like arteries leading to the heart of new stories to explore. The ruins along the way hinted at lives once lived, and she was curious to learn more.
Ten days later, Alba and Massimo bumped along in her dad’s old Fiat Punto down the dirt track to Tramarecchia. As they arrived at the red house the old man drew in a lungful of air. ‘Casa mia,’ he said, continuing in a mixture of English and Italian. ‘I feel free here. I have no family left to look after me in my own home and my doctor won’t permit me to live here alone.’ He patted his heart. ‘This fellow is not as strong as he used to be. He has seen too much, maybe.’
He unlocked the door. ‘Will you help me open the windows to air my palace, Alba? I can’t reach some of the handles now. I’ve shrunk even more.’ He laughed. ‘My name should really be Minimo.’
Alba laughed. It had been the first thing she’d thought when she’d seen him at Christmas. His name, meaning ‘biggest’, was not fitting at all; he was short even by Italian standards.
Entering his house was like stepping into the pages of a children’s illustrated storybook. Blackened pots and pans hung from a dresser in the small kitchen, and an old wood-burning stove for cooking stood in the corner. A square table and two chairs took up the centre of the room, and an easy chair sat by the side of a fireplace that extended across one end of the room, the hearth sooty from years of smoke.
A room at the back of the house served as a storeroom, with buckets, baskets and besom brooms, and a modern fridge-freezer that looked out of place with the rest of the old things. Upstairs, two bedrooms were furnished with dark chestnut wood wardrobes and narrow metal beds, the bedheads painted with flowers and leaves, crucifixes hanging on the walls above. Tucked in the corner of the bathroom, tiled from floor to ceiling in old-fashioned 1960s floral patterns, was the tiniest bath she had ever seen, only slightly bigger than a washbasin. A primitive cylindrical wood-burning stove for heating water stood in the other corner. Massimo proudly pointed out the modernisations he’d made to the house, including the stone staircase and the bathroom lined with pine boards. ‘Before this, we used to water the fields,’ he said. ‘Or kept a bucket in the corner of the bedroom.’
‘It’s all so cute,’ Alba said, opening the shutters to a view of the mountains covered in forest. ‘Have you always lived here alone?’
‘I lived here with my wife until she died. Twenty-four years I’ve been with
out her.’
He sighed. ‘Let’s go out in the open, and I’ll tell you some more of my story.’
Nine
England, 1943
For the three hundred Italian prisoners, it was a long, perilous journey from Africa to Liverpool, the danger of torpedoes ever-present. Massimo was violently seasick and was looked after by Salvatore, who came from the island of Sardinia. The pair had struck up an instant friendship on board the packed ship and Salvatore, or Salvo as he preferred to be called, always made sure to find a place next to Massimo.
‘Leave it to me,’ was Salvo’s byword. He was a wheeler-dealer, having traded in donkeys back in his home town of Oristano. He somehow always managed to procure the largest helpings when watery portions of potato soup were slopped onto their metal plates, and one day he proudly produced two tin mugs of real, strong coffee, winking at Massimo when he asked in amazement where he had managed to find it. ‘Ask me no questions,’ Salvo had said, tapping his nose. ‘Just knock it back and pretend you are in a posh bar in Italia, watching the pretty signorine walk by.’
One evening, when the sea was calmer and Massimo’s stomach felt less queasy, they played a couple of rounds of briscola with cards made by a friend of Salvo’s from thin cardboard, the images of swords, knaves, feathers and cups skilfully painted by hand.
‘I wonder where we will all end up,’ Massimo mused.
‘At least we know we’re going to Gran Bretagna, and we’ll be on the same continent as Italia,’ Salvo replied, shuffling the cards and expertly dealing.
‘Anywhere has to be better than Africa. I don’t think I could look at another potato or endure another sandstorm.’
‘Ah, but you and I both know we would eat anything if we had to,’ Salvo said, slapping down a trump to win the trick.
* * *
Peering under the flapping tarpaulin as their truck bumped over a country road in the middle of the Suffolk countryside, Massimo and Salvo observed the damp green landscape.