by Louisa Young
Blessings on you all, he thought. My parents, my grandparents, all of you, for what you have suffered and what you have feared. Thank you, Garibaldi and all the great souls of the Risorgimento, for uniting Italy as a country, and for opening the ghetto just in time for me to be born free.
It wasn’t so long ago, only twelve years, that he, aged twenty-one, had been walking up a frozen river, struggling and cold in a struggling and cold troop, heading to the pass, he didn’t know which pass. 1916. It was a pass many had used before them, the previous winter, but this winter was harder. His lingering memory was of staring down as he trudged and scrambled, his gloves worn and his boots not originally his, the underfoot so irregular he could not look ahead. Thinking about food and his mother. Unlikely to see much of either in the near future. And noticing, gradually, disbelievingly, under his trudging feet, under the dishevelled ice at which he stared, something familiar in the shapes and colours within the twist and darknesses. And then a man somewhere ahead slipped, and there was a moment of pause and breathcatching, and Aldo saw, quite clearly, what it was. Beneath his feet, deep in the ice, a man lay sleeping. His position was uncomfortable, Aldo could see that, but he could see too that he hadn’t moved for a while. He knew, of course, that he was dead; he must be dead, he wasn’t under the ice, he was inside it. He thought: Oh! he is ancient: a tattooed mountain wanderer, a caveman, an iron-age vagabond tricked by the severity of a three-thousand-year-old winter – But iron-age men did not wear military tunics, and between the clear and milky streaks of the ice the tunic was present – an arm within a sleeve, a shoulder out of kilter. The feet were naked; socks and boots reclaimed by those who could use them. His own feet, which he could scarcely feel in any case, shrivelled a little. But he couldn’t take his young eyes from the face. The dead man was in profile. He could – well he could – have been sleeping, but that he was pressed, distorted, only a little but enough, God yes, to haunt Aldo’s dreams that night and for several years: the man from the severity of last winter, or the winter before. And then, once Aldo had recognised the pattern and shape of the frozen human body, so it began to reappear, as the order came to trudge on, other shoulders. Other feet. Other faces within the clear and shining ice. Suspended, in some kind of eternity.
After a while, trudging over these frozen brothers, he no longer saw them. They were like the multi-coloured pebbles on the seabed, greys and ivories and whites, shapes. If they threatened to become again what they really were, he blinked and crossed his eyes a little, recasting his focus. He prayed for their souls as he went. Though he was not religious he was religious; this didn’t confuse him. Emotionally he was religious; politically not. If walking up this ladder of dead men demonstrated his commitment to a better future, so be it. If it helped the redemption of the Trentino, the Alto Adige, Trieste, he would do it. If Italy needed him to see men die; to run screaming at strangers, to sleep in barns, to walk forever, to gaze helplessly at the Isonzo week after week, and lurch himself at it over and over like a chained dog at a window, then he would do it. To end the war you had to fight the war. Only then could you rebuild. Those mountains, though. Those ravines and cliffs and zigzag paths – he’d be happy if he never saw a mountain again.
Confusion was his strongest memory; a confusion which leached between what had happened and how he felt about it still. He had not been able to make sense of what he had actually done. At Caporetto in October 1917, he had not run away – though 400,000 other people had. And 300,000 had been taken prisoner. Of each division which had deserted, afterwards, one in five men had been shot in punishment, platoon by platoon, and some of them shot their officers, and anyone without a rifle was shot, because why didn’t you have your rifle? You threw it away to run away faster didn’t you?
No Sir—
DIDN’T YOU?
NO SIR
and nobody knew if they’d be lined up and shot or lined up and made to shoot the others. That was the end of the war.
It was not a time for clarity. It was hard to know, in fact, if you had deserted or not. He thought, as best he could put it together in his mind, that having done his honest best he had found himself in the firestorm alongside someone who was trying to organise an orderly retreat, and he went with that flow. He was driven back among his fellows, and found himself way back in the Veneto, shamed and furious, and all around him men spoke of Russia, Russia – where the Bolsheviks were taking unspeakable liberties with authority.
And deserters – men he knew had deserted, properly deserted, deserted their companions who depended on them – were walking around, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and talking about the future—
Everything he had thought he was protecting was broken. The Pope said the war was a scandal, a useless slaughter – the Pope should be taken off and hung. And the government – talkers! Neutrals! Old men! They knew nothing. They had never really been behind the army.
Aldo coming home, in uniform, 1919, was mocked in the street. In Bologna a gang of youngsters, working men, thin desperate men, jostled him, shouted at him that he was a lackey and should be ashamed. He stopped, unafraid, to remonstrate with them. ‘Ragazzi,’ he said, ‘I’ve been in the war, what’s the matter with you? I’ve been fighting to win back Italian lands that were stolen from us – this is no shame, this is honour.’
And the least uncivil of them suggested he had been fighting for the rich and powerful, that the working man would see no benefit till the communists set Italy free – and the most uncivil of them spat at Aldo’s worn-out boots. ‘The war starts now, brother,’ they said, ‘here, in Italy, now’ – and Aldo stared at them with such total incomprehension that instead of passing on by they laughed and cried, ‘Come with us!’ and he could not get away.
So Aldo, aged twenty-three, trying to get back to Rome, thinking of his mother’s soup and a better world, in that order, found himself in the tight middle of a crowd of howling demonstrators and strikers all hurling stones and chanting. Occupying a factory? Rioting? He hardly knew, it disgusted him so. These children with their lock-outs and their strikes – and men old enough to know better. Communists, anarchists, Marxists: the shame of Italy, uncontrolled by the weakness of parliamentarians and liberals. The rot. What future would this build? No wonder the greybeards at Versailles were disrespecting Italy even now.
Aldo, the young man, was full of love, full of desire. He was in love with his saviour, Italy; his homeland, Rome. He saw it suffering: no food, harvests lost, families shredded, everything torn up by the war. He had read Dante; Mazzini; Crispi: he saw a bigger picture. As when the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, for whose inspired and glory-filled passages he had always had the greatest respect – now there is a man of the future! There is an Italian! – headed for Fiume with his band of freedom fighters and reclaimed the disputed city and just took it! And ruled it with such a manly, fiery sweep of inspiration! D’Annunzio! There was a man who was prepared to actually bloody DO SOMETHING. But Aldo had been away from home for too long. This chaos across the country frightened him, and his very bones ached for his own city. There were so many voices caterwauling round this precarious Tower of Babel: not just the communists and the anarchists but all kinds of rebels and crazy people, nebulists, idealists, cliques and recidivists, all blaming each other and leaping headlong to conclusions. Italy has not existed for very long. How can she hold when her children are in such a state?
Aldo had such a very different idea of how his world should be. He longed to mend, to heal, and to get on and build. He nurtured an idea of great glory: the Third Rome. After the ancient Empire when Rome ruled the known world, and the glories of the Renaissance when the wealth and creativity of Rome was without comparison, should Rome not rise again a third time? The Risorgimento had not, after all, been completed … Think what we could do with this magnificent country, if we could only harness our abilities and our strengths, if we could organise ourselves – Imagine if we could drain our malaria-infested marshes to make good farm
land. Imagine if we could help the contadini to farm more easily, more fruitfully; if we could build up the industries of the north, mine our minerals and educate our children. Imagine the roads, the bridges and tunnels, the aqueducts and the plumbing, clean fountains at every corner, electricity. Imagine if we could bring water to Sicily …
It was quite a thought, when you were slogging home, in someone else’s boots.
So, he had studied, qualified himself in engineering, with a sideline in surveying and hydraulics, married his wife and started fathering his children. He started straight in, working, building, helping.
In particular, Aldo was grateful that after all the weakness and chaos of the birthing pains immediately after the War, Italy had moved into such a magnificent period, where the struggle was clear, the direction was forward and the leader was strong. It was a wonderful time to be Italian. In fact if there was anything wrong for him it was that he was always slightly distracted by the possibility that his gratitude for being released from the ghetto and left unbothered might not have been adequately expressed to the authorities concerned. But then his optimism would burst through – left unbothered? Ha! No, you are part of it … You are part of it!
He was looking forward to next year, 1929. The Duce had taken to Parliament the proposal to drain the great swamps south of Rome, the Agro Pontino, and Parliament had accepted it. Next year they would start the clearing and levelling. Left unbothered! Far from it – he would be joining in!
The train scooted on. He could smell some late stubble burning, over the metal smell of train. They should be ploughing by now, he thought, looking out over the framed land. We’ll make so much more farmable land. The ditches and canals we’ll dig, the roads we’ll lay, the lovely fields and homesteads and little towns … He knew the stories about the Agro Pontino, of course – the snakes as long as a man, the quicksands, the bandits, the treacherous tangled forest and scrub. Stagnant pools and backwaters, seasonal riverlets with nowhere to drain, ghosts and wicked spirits, streams drying out, nothing but frogs and eels and mosquitoes can live there, malaria, malaria, malaria … And it wasn’t consistent: from one dip to another it would shift and trick you – and it changed with the seasons, and the weather: lush with green weed one week, underwater the next, mud the month after that. Putrid clayclad pools that never dried out. Islets and strips of land that might look secure, but only a fool or a drowned man would dare to step on them …
This swampy chaos was to be mapped and divided and controlled. To the north-east were the Lepini Mountains. To the south-west lay the Tyrrhenian sea. Between them lay two long parallel sections of disparate marsh, separated by the ghost of the coastline of hundreds of thousands of years ago: a long long dune, more or less parallel with the coast and the mountains between which it reclines, known as the Quaternary Dune. This dune made a barrier just high enough to keep inside it all the water from the mountains and rivers around: it all ended up there with no way over the dune to the sea, trickling about aimlessly on the flat, flooding the whole plain each autumn, leaving all the silt and mud it brought down with it, vaguely making its way forty kilometres south-east to Terracina, solidifying a little as it dried out in the summer, before welcoming a new season’s rain and silt. This was the plain of Piscinara. Outside it, between the dune and the new coast, lay the second sweep of marshes. Nero had dug a canal through the Quaternary Dune to drain Piscinara; it had silted up. Napoleon and Garibaldi and Leonard and countless Popes and Prussians and speculators and aristocrats had tried and tried to drain these places. And failed.
Aldo was smiling as the train drew in. He’d stared down at the marshes from Sezze and Cisterna. The surveyors were ready, maps and designs on their way.
We’re going to dig a bloody great canal from the top of the plain to the sea, and all the water will drain into it, the mountain streams and the rivers, the Fosso di Cisterna, the Teppia, the Fosso Moscarello … all the rain, all the snowmelt, all the sludge. We’re going to bring electricity from Cisterna in giant cables, blow up any rocks that get in our way, dig and dig and dig.
Next year, Aldo thought, with a little shiver of pride. He had been having ideas as well for the other end of the project: how about mosquito netting; lovely little netted-in verandahs on the front of each house, so people could still sit outside but have an extra layer of protection? Just until we’ve wiped the cursed insects out …
What a job! What a wonderful job!
Next year, he thought, I’ll invite the English down to see how we’re doing.
*
Susanna Norsa had spent her early life praying, sewing, and listening politely to her aunts and their friends as they prayed and sewed. She fully expected to spend her entire life in variations of this scene: moving up in role from niece to aunt, from aunt to great-aunt, perhaps; to mother and grandmother, if her father arranged things so. She hadn’t thought much beyond it. There was no reason to. Nobody had ever suggested it. And she loved to embroider. And outside was quite dirty.
One of the aunts, a tiresome dissatisfied Aunt Rebecca, given to sighing and wishing for things, told her one afternoon behind the white linen curtains, in the shaded hush of siesta, that there was a painting, in a church, of their ancestors. Susanna could hardly believe her. Church was nothing to do with them. Why would Christians have a painting of Jews in their church?
‘Our ancestor Daniele did something very wicked,’ Aunt Rebecca whispered, toxic and gleeful. ‘He and his son Isaac. I don’t know what so don’t pester me asking about it. You will never know. It is forbidden. It is the church on via Monteverdi. Santa Maria della Vittoria.’
Susanna asked her father. She was not afraid of him.
He – bearded, arch-browed, a man unchanged for generations – said: ‘It’s the way of things that we are tolerated, not welcomed. It’s always been thus. If we are quiet, all is well.’ She did not press. She had never felt the need for her own wisdom, and she liked quiet.
The year Susanna turned fourteen, a quick and vicious surge of something incomprehensible rose in her, and she found her customary logic and her habits of obedience quite unsatisfactory. For absolutely no reason, coming home from school one afternoon, she turned away from the route, removed her headscarf, tucked in her white collar, and strode off, guilty feet striking the street, to via Monteverdi. There was a church: white, stucco, its portico the gay shape of a woman curtseying in a long skirt, holding up the cloth. It was not that one. It was naked brick, tucked into the corner, small and imperturbable. Her pause at the door was brief. It had to be, or she would never dare enter. She entered. She did not burn up like a dead leaf in a fire. There was a painting, and another … she found her ancestors. Two men and two women, in a row, on a panel alone at the bottom of a painting of someone else’s glory. The younger man would be Isaac.
Susanna’s rebellious surge did not last long, but she retained this one small act of independence: going without permission, in clothing as un-Jewish-looking as she could muster, to the church where the painting hung, to look at Isaac’s handsome face, full of ritegno, a holding back, a dignity. She developed and bore, on his behalf, a rich prideful resentment which gave purpose and value to the dappled shadow of shame that her name, in that town, had carried for hundreds of years. When she learnt the complex story, of how Daniele had whitewashed over a fresco of the Virgin Mary on the wall of his house, and paid a dozen punishments for it, it simply made her prouder of Isaac. He had stood by his father, suffered alongside him. She felt the blessing of not being alive at that time, four hundred years ago, when a Jew could be fined and tormented over and over for doing something he’d been given permission to do. When she visited Isaac, she talked to him. Soon enough she came to love him. She prayed for him when they prayed for the dead.
When she met Aldo, the handsome engineering student, he looked to her like Isaac Norsa – only with the ineffable advantage of being alive. Aldo knew and loved the past but his talk was all of the future. To him Trent was not ancien
t anti-Semitic scandals about who had accused who of making matzohs with the blood of a small boy in 1475, but Italian land redeemed, finally, from foreigners by the blood of Italian soldiers, including a little of his own. He had served on the Isonzo, he had been one of the straws whirled on the vast chaotic floodtides of Caporetto.
When Aldo spoke of the new Italy; of the sacrifices made, of the need for discipline and cleanliness and order and common sense, Susanna’s rather weary young heart lit up. Hers was not a fancy family; not wealthy, not ambitious. All that was required was respectable survival at a level which permitted charitable donations and decent marriage prospects. Had Susanna’s infatuation with the portrait been known, it would not have been comprehended in the slightest. Her infatuation with Aldo produced much the same response, among the embroidered linen tablecloths and the carefully polished glasses.
But to Susanna, here was a man with passion enough for two. Yes, he lectured. But so he should! He knew so much, and he shared it. He knew about Daniele and Isaac – and he knew about the future too. She listened carefully, head down, ears wide open. ‘The regiments who let us down at Caporetto – do you know who they were? They were full of the munitions workers from Turin – the ones who had been rioting. Yes! Sent to the middle of our campaign as a punishment. Not the most intelligent bit of planning. And everyone knew they were going to give themselves up. Why would people like that have any loyalty to their country?’ Susanna could not answer. She knew nothing. But that was all right, because no answer was required. ‘They made no secret of it. Their officers locked themselves in at night, in fear of their own men. They didn’t even consider themselves to be in the army! Some of them refused their tobacco and charity socks – they said they didn’t qualify to receive them – tell me, Susanna, how can good Italians be brought to this treachery? To plan in advance to surrender, and for nobody to notice that?’