Death in Sardinia

by Marco Vichi

  Gavino was telling for the thousandth time the story of the night when they saw a column of Tigers pass along a country road … The sinister tanks were moving at a leisurely pace, about fifty yards apart. Covering their faces with mud, Commander Bordelli and his comrades had taken up positions in the ditches at the side of the road …

  ‘Open the sweet wine,’ he said to his wife. Maria uncorked a bottle and filled the glasses, and Gavino resumed his tale.

  Pietrino felt good, sunk deep into the armchair and warmed by the fire, his father’s story swirling about in his sleepy head, the sound of the fire consuming the wood in the background. The sun was setting, the room slowly darkening. After a while the only remaining light came from the red flames reflecting on the faces of those present. Maria stood up to turn on the light.

  ‘Don’t bother, Mamma,’ said Piras.

  ‘There’s the fire.’

  ‘I’m not sure everybody likes it, Nino,’ his mother said, finger on the light switch. The others said it wasn’t a problem, and Maria sat back down. Gavino finished his story, and everyone sat in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘Pina, why don’t you tell us something about Benigno?’ Piras asked, wanting to hear another story. Pina nodded.

  ‘Where was Benigno during the war?’ Piras asked.

  ‘He was in the Piedmont. He went through some terrible times there,’ Pina said with a sad smile. But one could see she was happy to talk a little about her unlucky cousin.

  ‘Forget that awful story,’ Giovanni said, waving dismissively. Apparently he’d heard it too many times.

  ‘Let her speak,’ said Maria. Gavino also wanted to hear it.

  ‘It’s rather long …’ said Pina, looking at her husband as if asking his permission.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ said Pietrino, curling up in the armchair. Giovanni resigned himself and refilled his glass. Pina started talking, staring into the fire.

  ‘When the king got rid of Mussolini, Benigno was a soldier in the Piedmont, at a base in Asti. Nobody knew what to do. Many of them actually thought the war was over. Nino wasn’t even twenty years old, and all he knew how to do was to tend sheep …’

  Piras closed his eyes and listened to Pina’s story, translating her dialect into Italian, and her details into historic moments …

  Marshal Badoglio announced the signing of the armistice on the radio, and by the following day the military commands ceased receiving orders. The country seemed left to its own devices. Nobody had any idea what might happen next. Word spread that the king had left for Brindisi together with Badoglio to welcome the Allies, who had already landed in Sicily some time before. Others said that those two had simply taken to their heels. Benigno didn’t understand a thing about any of this. He sensed only that everything was up in the air and waited to see what his fellow servicemen would do. Then news came that Rome had been occupied by Hitler’s troops, and a few days later Mussolini was freed by the Nazis. The Duce’s voice returned to the radio waves and wearily announced the constitution of the Italian Social Republic. In barracks across the land, soldiers took off their uniforms and left, officers included. Benigno did the same. He threw away his uniform and started walking. He’d grasped just one thing in all this: that it was best to hide. He slept for three nights in an abandoned warehouse outside Asti. On the fourth day he started walking again, and after a few hours he stopped at the empty stable of a large villa along a road leading out of the city. The villa was about fifty yards away and must have been inhabited, because he saw smoke rising above the roof. To avoid being discovered by the owners, he would go out at sunrise and return after sunset. During the day, Benigno roamed the countryside, eating sour apples and knocking on the doors of peasants’ houses asking for bread. He had no idea what was happening in the rest of Italy. At times he would ask the peasants, but nobody felt like taking the time to answer. One evening, when he returned to his stall, he found a bundle wrapped in paper. Inside was a piece of bread and a strip of lard. Someone had discovered that a stranger was secretly sleeping in the stable, and with that gesture had proved to be a friend. Perhaps it was even the villa’s owners, but there was no way of knowing. The following morning Benigno went out shortly after daybreak as usual. When he returned that evening, he found bread and lard in the stall again. And there was even a cigarette. The bread was very dark but delicious. He fell asleep with a full belly after smoking the cigarette down to the end and burning his fingers. At dawn he jolted awake to the rumble of engines approaching. It sounded like lorries. He heard them stop in front of the villa. Spying through a crack, he saw some black-clad military men jumping out of the trucks in the fog. There must have been fifteen of them, all armed with machine guns and moving brusquely about. Farther ahead there was also a very fine black car with mud spattered along its sides. Two men began to thrust their shoulders into the villa’s front door while three others started walking briskly towards the stable. Benigno felt his heart sink. There were no windows to escape through, and so he went and hid himself in a pile of straw. But the soldiers found him almost immediately. They wore shiny boots and had death’s heads sewn on to their uniforms. They started kicking him at first, then dragged him out, screaming curses in his ears. When they were in front of the villa, they left him on the ground, and he stayed down, thinking that his life was about to end. The house’s inhabitants were already lined up on the lawn: two women who looked like sisters, an elderly man, a young boy, and two little girls with jet-black hair. In the all-enveloping fog, it looked like a scene from hell. At that point the car door opened, and a man of about thirty stepped out, dressed in a very smart uniform. He came forward calmly, as if entering the opera house. He had a short whip in his hand, and as he walked he swatted it lightly against his thigh.

  ‘My, my, look what we have here …’ he said, examining the prisoners. He made a gesture with his head, and a handful of his men went back inside the villa.

  ‘As if it weren’t enough that you’re Jews, I see you’ve also taken to hiding deserters,’ he said calmly, looking at the woman and the old man.

  ‘They didn’t know,’ Benigno ventured to say. The demon turned towards him.

  ‘What was that, cur?’

  ‘I was sleeping in the stall in secret, they didn’t know anything,’ Benigno repeated, then put his head back down. The man walked slowly towards him and stopped beside him.

  ‘Apparently you’re one of those curs that still has the courage to speak,’ he said. Benigno raised his head to look at him, and at once the whip struck him across the mouth. He fell face down into the mud, feeling blood pour over his tongue. Those who had gone into the house came back out in a flurry and gathered round the leader like chicks.

  ‘We didn’t find anything, sir, but there are marks on the walls where there used to be paintings,’ said one of them, stiff as a tree trunk.

  ‘Well, well,’ the commander said, smiling. He dug in his heels and had a look around. Taking a deep breath, he took a gold cigarette case out of his pocket, opened it, took a cigarette, tapped it two or three times against the case, and put it between his lips. Before he had even begun to put the gold case back into his pocket, a lighted match appeared before him, held by a devoted soldier of his. He inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upwards, then lightly shook his head, as if something didn’t seem right to him. Unlike the others, he didn’t betray the slightest haste in any of his gestures. It was as though it were up to him to decide how quickly time should pass. Walking slowly, he approached the prisoners again. The boy looked at him with hollow eyes as though unable to grasp what was happening. The man stopped in front of the two little girls and tapped the ash from his cigarette. Then he moved on and stopped in front of the women.

  ‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know in ten seconds, I shall do the following: I shall order one of my men to take one of those lovely little girls, tie her to the back of the car with a rope and go for a drive through the mountains,’ he said calmly. The women fell to thei
r knees, and with their eyes popping out of their heads said in unison that everything was hidden in the cellar, behind a brick wall.

  ‘Get up,’ the commander said, walking away.

  ‘I don’t like worms that crawl along the ground.’ The Fascists had already gone to the lorries to fetch pickaxes, and four of them went back into the house. There was a sound of hammering for a few minutes, and then one of them came out, half covered in dust.

  ‘It’s all there, sir.’

  ‘Four of you stay here; everybody else, to the cellar,’ said the commander.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  In short order they removed a treasury of paintings and jewels from the cache and loaded their booty on to one of the lorries. They made the prisoners board the other lorry, and then the convoy left. The half-hour that followed was terrible. The Fascists raped the two women and beat up the men in front of the screaming children. Then the vehicles stopped along a mountain road in the middle of a wood. They made everyone get out and started walking through the trees. The captain led the way, whistling a march.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ one of the women whispered, but nobody replied. The silence was worse than screams. The soldiers, on the other hand, seemed calm. They stopped in a clearing and made the prisoners stand in a line, with Benigno at one end and the old man at the other. The three children were in the middle, clinging to the women’s legs. The Fascists took about ten steps back and raised the barrels of their machine guns.

  ‘Shouldn’t we have them dig a pit?’ asked one of them.

  ‘In a week’s time, even their bones will be gone,’ said another.

  ‘It’s full of wild boar around here.’ Benigno didn’t believe such a thing could actually happen. He was wrong.

  ‘Fire!’ said the commander, and the Fascists started shooting. It was over very quickly. The children’s bodies were thrown backwards by the force of the bullets.The others fell like empty sacks. Then silence returned. The air smelled of gunpowder. Benigno felt his shoulder burning, but he was alive. He lay still, with his eyes half open, the better to pretend he was dead. He’d fallen back with his face towards the Fascists and saw everything. One of them pulled out some cigarettes and passed them round to the others.

  Somebody moaned. One of the women was still alive. The captain went up to her and gestured brusquely for a pistol. One of the soldiers ran and put one in his hand. The captain released the safety catch and shot the woman in the head. He did the same with the old man and then the children. After shooting them all he arrived at Benigno and pointed the gun at his head as indifferently as if looking at his fingernails to see whether they were dirty. Benigno saw his face through his half-closed eyelashes … He saw the round, all-powerful eyes looking at him with indifference. But by this point he was playing dead in earnest and not moving. Indeed, he remembered thinking: Let’s hope he doesn’t see a vein pulsing. Half a second later, the captain pulled the trigger and the pistol clicked. The others were some ten yards away, chatting. The captain fired again, and again the pistol clicked. And all at once it started raining, big fat drops that made a great deal of noise when they hit the trees and the ground.There was a clap of thunder, and a second later the floodgates opened.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ the Fascists yelled, covering their heads with their jackets. The commander stayed back for another second, looking at the deserter’s body, then put the pistol in his pocket and ran off with the others. A few minutes later Benigno heard the lorries and cars drive away. As he raised his head, a sob rose up in his throat. He was alive. Still alive. He got on his knees, kissing the rain as it fell on his face, and started crying like a child. The bullet that should have killed him had remained inside the barrel. It was God who had done it. It was He who held it back … And then He sent the rain, the rain which crashed down like a waterfall, washing away the smell of his fear. His shoulder burned, but he had no other wounds. It all seemed so absurd to him. Before him lay the other bodies, pelted by the rain and bleeding, heads smashed in by that last bullet. The two little girls looked like rag dolls fished out of the sea. It was a scene so chilling, it didn’t seem real. Benigno stood up but had trouble remaining on his feet. He wished he could bury those bodies, but he had no tools and couldn’t move his injured shoulder without feeling great pain. He made the sign of the cross in the air, as he’d always seen the village priest do, then said ‘Amen’ three or four times and staggered away from that hell. He took meagre refuge under a large tree and uncovered the wounded shoulder. There were two holes in his flesh. The bullets had passed through him without stopping. The blood kept flowing out, washed away at once by the rainwater. Putting his shirt back on, he went towards a more densely wooded area. He didn’t even know where he was. A few hours later he reached a secluded farmstead surrounded by abandoned fields, and collapsed on the ground. Some peasants attended to his wounds and let him stay in the stall for a fortnight or so, then gave him some bread and pancetta and asked him please to leave. They were afraid of the Nazis and the Black Brigades. They’d heard tell of some terrible things, they said, wide eyed. Benigno understood, thanked them and went on his way.

  Up in the hills, deserters had formed armed bands and were roaming the countryside like him, in search of food. Benigno spent a few months with one such group, sharing what little food they could get from the local peasants. They numbered nineteen, and the oldest among them was under twenty-five. During the winter they hid out in an abandoned stable. It snowed a great deal, and they suffered in the cold but felt protected. For several months they ate only chestnuts and the few wild animals they’d managed to catch with rudimentary traps.

  In late March they set out again. When passing through one mountain village they learned that in the Langhe, some partisan armies had formed to fight the Fascists. Nearly all of his group decided to join them, Benigno included. He hadn’t quite understood what he was going to do, but it seemed like the right thing. And so the volunteers marched off, walking from sunset to sunrise and hiding wherever they could during the day. One evening, as night was falling, they were set upon by some triggerhappy Black Brigades along the banks of a stream. Three or four of Benigno’s comrades fell into the water at once, while the others scattered in every direction through the woods. Benigno himself ran for at least half an hour without looking back. When he finally stopped, he was alone again. His face was scratched and bloodied by the branches he’d run through, but he was still alive, again. He even managed to survive the great round-up of November ’44, hiding in an old tomb in a mountain cemetery. When the weather began to improve, he joined a band of partisan fighters as a cook and stayed with them until April of ’45. Then in May he set sail at last for Sardinia. For many years he continued to have nightmares about the day of the firing squad. He would see the round hole of the pistol’s barrel again, the indifferent eyes staring at him, and instead of clicking, the gun would fire …

  ‘When he used to sleep here with us I would hear him cry out in the night,’ said Pina, her wrinkled face lit up red by the flames. Piras looked asleep, but he’d listened carefully to the whole story and was turning something over in his head.

  ‘I didn’t know that story,’ said Gavino.

  ‘I know it by heart,’ Giovanni said, sleepy eyed.

  ‘Poor Benigno,’ Maria whispered.

  ‘He always said that every new day was a gift for him … but then …’ Pina said, trying to smile. Someone filled the glasses again. Giovanni relit his Tuscan cigar, tossed the match into the fire, and all at once started telling the story of a horrible vendetta that had taken place some twenty years earlier at Bauladu. Piras was unable to listen, however. He kept thinking of Benigno pretending to be dead, and tried to imagine himself in his place … He saw the Fascist commander approach, saw his eyes, saw the gun barrel and heard it go … click … click … click … click …

  Rosa finished rolling the ‘cigarette’, licking the paper to seal it. She lit it, took two drags and passed it to Bordelli. It was
already their second, but that evening neither of them felt like laughing. The Endrigo record ended, and the gramophone’s arm returned to its cradle. Rosa was having one of her rare evenings of melancholy. She’d spent Christmas Eve with her girlfriends. She’d got too drunk and vomited. But it had been a pleasant evening, as was only fitting for the baby Jesus’s birthday. At midnight they’d all sat in silence, listening to the church bells ringing, and then they’d put on some music and started dancing …

  Now, however, she felt a little depressed. This often happened after a good party. As she watched the blinking lights on the Christmas tree and smoked that stuff, some memories came back to her, and she started telling stories, almost as if talking to herself. Having apparently understood the general mood, Gideon jumped into Rosa’s lap and started sucking her woollen sweater as if it were his mother’s teats. Bordelli lay on the sofa with eyes closed, listening … In his mind Rosa’s words turned into images as sharp as a movie’s …

  Rosa was born in the countryside near Florence, in a small outlying ward of Tavarnelle. When she was six or seven she used to play with other peasant children who lived in the area. There were five of them, two girls and three boys. They used to spend every afternoon together, year round, happily excluded from the compulsory education of the Fascist government. They had boundless territory to explore and sometimes didn’t come home until after dark.

  Other times they would stop in front of Andrea’s house, which stood on an embankment supported by a dry retaining wall and looked out over the surrounding countryside. The vineyard descended in terraces down to a drainage trench they called ‘the fallen waters’. Opposite them rose a big hill entirely covered with a dense, dark pine forest; and here and there the pointed black tips of cypresses stuck out above the boughs of needles. Everyone called the hill the Witches’ Mount. One afternoon Andrea told them that there was a creature called the Monster of the Three Goats, half man, half beast, who roamed the pine wood at night and killed everyone he came across. Nobody believed him. It was a tale a little too tall to swallow. But Andrea swore it was all true, crossing his fingers over his lips and kissing them to prove it. And all at once they saw an old woman, thin as a rail, walking along the grassy path below the embankment. She was wearing a black scarf over her head, her bright white hair sticking out everywhere and reflecting almost blue in the light. She was coming towards them.