The Italian Villa: An emotional and absolutely gripping WW2 historical romance

by Daniela Sacerdoti

  Malva (Malva sylvestris) is a spontaneous European plant. Its name comes from the Latin mollire, to calm. In the Middle Ages, it came to symbolize calm, love and sweetness. It was so powerful and commonly used it came to be considered an omnimorba, which means “a plant that can cure all ailments.”

  Malva’s name symbolized sweetness. Was she really as sweet as everyone thought? Why had she not given me back to her family, when she knew she was sick – and instead had me adopted? The usual pang of loss and longing filled me as I thought of my adoptive parents. It was impossible to keep resenting them for having hidden the truth about my birth from me. I just wished I could tell them all that had been happened. I was desperate for them to know that I’d found my way home.

  I asked myself what Malva and my adoptive parents had wished for me. Happiness and love, for sure, but what were their dreams and ambitions for me? The time spent together had been so short, maybe too short for them to even think of how my life would shape up. Flora had said that healing was in our blood; had Malva hoped that I would follow the family tradition somehow?

  Passiflora: (Passiflora incarnata) is linked with passion and tragedy. A legend says it grew on Jesus’ cross after His crucifixion. A South American legend talks about the tragic destiny of Maracujà, a noblewoman engaged to a captain but in love with a young indigenous man instead. She was confined in her house and watched her beloved from the window, until one night he didn’t come. Word reached her that he’d been killed by Maracujà’s fiancé, the captain. Crazy with pain, Maracujà begged an old woman from her beloved’s tribe to pierce her heart with an arrow. From the wound grew a strange and wonderful plant, whose petals opened to the sun and closed to the moon: Passiflora. Passiflora is said to be a remedy for heartache and loss.

  Trust Flora to have some tragic story behind her name. I went on reading until the chilly evening wind began to blow. It was time to go inside. As I gathered the books, a small leaflet fell out of one of them.

  Naturopathy Academy, Turin

  Three-year course, accredited Naturopath

  Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology

  Way of Nature: herbal traditions

  Natural Nutrition

  Aromatherapy…

  And it went on, a list of subjects that sounded like a whole new world, a curtain opening on something that was alien and yet familiar. I thought of what Elisa kept writing in her diary over and over, about helping people and healing people. On the corner of the leaflet were some scribbled details of dates, and what must be train times between Turin and Montevino. This must have been the college Flora attended, I deduced.

  A thought began making its way into my mind – something I didn’t want to put in words, not yet – and I set it aside to mull over. I tucked the leaflet back into the book, and opened the diary once again.

  Elisa’s brother was in the army, her love had joined the Resistance, and she was left in what would soon be a place at war. I couldn’t quite put her story in context, because back in school, we’d barely touched on the details of the Second World War in Europe, concentrating on the American side of things. Now I regretted it, because I didn’t know what would happen next in Elisa’s story. All I remembered was that battles would be fought on Italian territory.

  Now I noticed that Elisa had skipped her usual introduction. The tone was frantic and her handwriting, usually deliberate and beautiful, was rushed and messy.

  It’s like a rising tide. Every day something happens, and we can’t keep up with the news. Tonight, when we switched on the radio, Mussolini’s familiar booming voice didn’t fill the room as it usually did. It was General Badoglio, once Mussolini’s right-hand man, the hero of the Great War. According to propaganda, he had bent the savage people of Ethiopia to our superior will and contributed to the creation of the Italian colonial empire, of which he’d been proclaimed vice-king. I knew enough of fascist propaganda not to believe a word of praise sung about him, but what he said tonight was astonishing.

  “…The Italian government, recognizing the impossibility of continuing the unequal fight against the overpowering enemy forces, in order to preserve the nation from further and even more terrible hardships, has petitioned General Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies of England and the United States of America. Our requests have been accepted. Therefore, any hostile act by the Italian army against the Anglo-American forces must cease everywhere. However, they will react to attack from any other forces…”

  I gasped. Mamma turned from the sink and searched for Papa’s eyes. Zia Costanza laid down her rosary slowly. I swear that even from this isolated place, we could hear the rising voices in the village.

  “Does this mean that Pietro will come back?” Mamma burst out.

  “Shhh! There’s more!” Papa said, and we kept listening while the news sank in. An armistice had been signed with the Allies, our enemies – was it over? Was the war over? Were we free again?

  Would Leo and Pietro return to me, to us?

  We looked at each other, not knowing how to express the complicated mix of joy and disbelief. And then, a crackling noise, and the official transmission was halted. Another voice began to speak, one we’d never heard before. The signal was disturbed, and Papa wheeled himself nearer the radio to listen.

  “Italy will not surrender; Italy will keep fighting. We will stand by the German side, as we’ve always done, and open our doors to them as friends and liberators from the treacherous snakes who sold us out. Our proud army will never stop battling the Allies, and we urge all civilians, men and women, to join the fight…”

  There was more, and we listened to every word, without being able to make much sense of it. Finally, the message was over, and the usual transmission began again. It was just music now, an incongruous end to all that upheaval.

  “Luigi…” Mamma pleaded. She’s always been a woman with her own mind, but since Pietro left there has been a subtle, yet clear change in her. Now she looks to Papa to make sense of this chaotic world; she looks to him to guide us, when nothing around us makes sense. I think she uses all her strength to believe that Pietro will come back unscathed.

  “I think it means civil war,” Papa said, and a chill went down my spine. “Badoglio and his people want the war over. But the staunch fascists will not accept that. The war will be here, now. In every village and in every house.”

  “People will divide in two,” Costanza said. “And they will fight.”

  “But will Pietro return?” Mamma implored again.

  They exchanged a long look. Papa didn’t answer.

  August 10, 1943

  Caro Diario,

  With almost all men – even the youngest and the oldest, even the sick – called to the army, medics are almost nowhere to be found. Dottor Quirico and I seldom go to patients together now: we wouldn’t be able to see to them all. A quick way to convince people to trust women doctors, I suppose… If only there were more around here than just me. People might stare and grumble less when they see me, but they have no choice but to accept me. Thank goodness for my mother and the women like her, or people would have nobody to turn to. Only now I realize how hard Dottor Quirico’s job must have been before he bought a car, when he went everywhere on horseback, or cycled up and down the valleys in every type of weather. But there are places we simply can’t reach by car or bike – only a horse, or on feet, will do. Thankfully the community is helping: the Conte has allowed me to borrow one of his horses, a mare called Vento, so many times that he said I can call it mine; and Leone provides me with coffee and sweets to bring to the patients, and keep me going too. God knows where they find coffee and sugar, but bless them that they do.

  I try my best and work as hard as I can, but it seems like everything we do is a little drop of goodness against the rising tide. News comes so fast that we can barely make sense of it. The Germans are coming. The Americans are coming… We don’t know what to expect, we don’t know where to look.

  We have no idea wh
at Pietro’s fate might be, and none of us can find peace. Before everything fell apart, they would send a telegram to tell families of wounded or deceased soldiers; but now, in this chaos, nobody knows anything… And my little brother’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

  Oh, caro Diario.

  I’m writing this almost with my head on my elbow, I’m so exhausted. But I made it, I saved Patrice’s life. She’s only seven. And to see her like that, eaten alive by the fever. Thank goodness I remembered something Professor Bacher said to me at university…

  But I’m not making sense, I know! I’ll tell you all. Dottor Quirico is away for two days, south of Montevino, almost near Turin, so my work has doubled.

  I’ve barely managed to lay my head on the pillow because there has been a small flu epidemic across the local villages, and I haven’t stopped for a moment. We heard calling at our door, in the middle of the night – a woman’s voice.

  “Dotor! Dotor!” She spoke in a mountain dialect, more similar to French than to our own Montevino sound. I heard my mother letting her in while I got dressed as quickly as I could. I ran downstairs and saw a woman wrapped in woolen shawls, pale and with huge, frightened blue eyes. She must have come from very far, her dialect and her clothes told me. It was only then I realized she was unshod, and she didn’t even carry a petrol lamp.

  “Please come. My daughter is dying,” she said, and the lack of emotion in her words was contradicted by her trembling body and her bare, bleeding feet.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Nourissat.”

  I paused. Nourissat? That’s where Tommaso had taken me to see the wolves. Imagine walking all that way in the dark, without shoes, and with wolves roaming the forests… That poor woman!

  “Nourissat?” I was astounded. That is high up, and the only way to get up there is by dirt path – when there are any. Otherwise, it’s stony ground or fields. “Did somebody bring you? You came on horseback?”

  The woman shook her head. “Please come.” Her voice was hoarse with exhaustion. Beneath the dirt and the tiredness that lined her face, I guessed she was very young, maybe younger than me.

  “I will. Don’t worry. Who’s sick? Who needs my help?”

  “My daughter. The fever is not going away.”

  Mamma and I exchanged a glance, and Mamma ran out of the room while I grabbed my bag and wrapped myself in a shawl. Mamma returned with a pair of stockings for the mountain woman, which she refused. “We must hurry.”

  “Keep them,” my mother said, and pushed them into the woman’s hand. We strode out into the dark, and I led her towards the Conte’s stable. I readied Vento, and we were off.

  It took almost three hours, and even Vento struggled. We finally arrived at a small wood cabin, dimly lit from within. A stony-faced man let us in, murmuring something under his breath. Mountain dialects are similar enough to Montevino ones for me to understand that he thought doctors kill their patients more than sicknesses do. Thank you, sir.

  The little girl was clean, unlike everybody else in the cabin – two other children, barefooted and wide-eyed like their mother. She was burning hot, a fever so violent I realized at once this was not the flu that had been raging in the villages. My medicine bag looked desolate, half empty and mostly made up of remedies my mamma had made for me; not the strong, modern medicine I’d dreamed of using when I’d started my course. Two things I’d learned, in my brief time as a doctor: that poverty and ignorance do even more damage than sickness; and that war kills in many ways, not just by catching a bullet in your body.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Patrice.”

  “Patrice,” I repeated, and gently swept her hair away from her forehead. Her chest was rising and falling frantically, and her heart was racing.

  An infection of the brain, maybe.

  “Has she been complaining of a sore head?”

  “No.”

  Tuberculosis?

  “Has she been coughing?”

  “No.”

  Her father began pacing up and down, throwing his hands in the air. “I told you this would be no use! Dotori know nothing! And this is not even a dotor! She’s a fémna!” A woman. I ignored him. His daughter’s life was more important than anything this man could throw at me.

  I laid my hand on the girl’s forehead and held her hand. I closed my eyes. Silence fell on the cabin. Maybe they thought I was performing some superstitious ritual, but I was just concentrating.

  And then it happened. The girl began to cool right under my hands, and her skin, which was dry before, began to sweat so hard it was almost leaking fluids. Cold sweat. I felt the little girl’s temperature crash with every second that passed.

  I knew what it was.

  And I also knew I had no medicine to cure her, no way to save her.

  The mother must have read my expression, because she yelped like a wounded animal.

  “A basin of fresh water, please,” I asked. The mother made a quick gesture, and one of the children ran out with a carved wooden bowl only to return a moment later. The water was freezing cold, straight from the glacier streams. I washed my hands and dried them on a clean cloth I’d brought with me.

  “You need to wait an hour or so, then wash her down. Be careful she catches as little cold as possible; keep her covered as you wash her down. Then wrap her up warm, very warm, until the fever comes back.”

  “The fever will come back?”

  I nodded, looking straight at her. “It has happened before, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Many times.” The woman looked at her husband, a gaze that was full of resentment mixed with fear. Clearly, he’d stopped her from calling a doctor. And the girl had malaria.

  It seems impossible that malaria would strike someone who lives in the mountains. But the girls who went to work in the rice fields would catch it, and in spite of the mountain air, bring the contagion back. It would be rare for someone to catch it so high up, but quite common somewhere like Montevino. Or it used to be, but the authorities worked long and hard to eradicate malaria. They stopped rice fields from being too close to villages and they distributed quinine free to the rice girls and the general population. Quinine is quite simply the bark of a tree that grows overseas. Before the war, you could get it everywhere; you could buy it in the drogheria – the chemist – and drink it in an acqua tonica at a bar, mixed with water, gin and sugar. This meant that malaria went from killing many, many people, to being almost eradicated.

  Almost. Like I said, war kills in many ways.

  “How often does the fever come?”

  “Every four days.”

  I nodded. That is how malaria works. The fever comes back and then falls in different cycles, from one to four days.

  “She’ll die?” the woman said, without feeling, though her face was a mask of pain.

  “I can’t say, right now.”

  Yes, but it will take a while. And a lot of suffering.

  “Is there no medicine?”

  There is. War took it away from us.

  “There is, but I don’t have it, and the other doctor in the village doesn’t either. But I’ll do my best to find it. I’ll send someone around, even to Turin. I promise you, I’ll do my very best. I’ll be back soon.” I was sure the Conte would ask one of his men to go by car, scour the pharmacies, beg other doctors to part from their precious quinine… I had to find a way.

  Days passed. I received bad news after bad news. There was no quinine to be found. I didn’t believe that, of course; I knew that it was there, but nobody wanted to part with it. Those who had some kept it for themselves or their family and friends. They did not want to give it away to a woman doctor in a mountain village, just to cure a little girl from a castaway place.

  One afternoon, I had to take myself away from everything, and went to the cabin in the High Woods where Leo and I used to go. I punched the stones until my hands bled, but I didn�
�t care. Three hours north a little girl was dying, her internal organs ravaged by parasites. And there was nothing I could do.

  It was then that I remembered Professor Bacher giving us a lecture about the effects of malaria on the heart. He said that before quinine was widespread, they tried to use…

  Methylene blue.

  I had to try.

  Finally, after a two-day search, the Conte’s man drove back from Turin with a dose of methylene blue. I made my way back to the cabin straight away, praying that I would find the place again when I’d only seen it in darkness, and praying the girl was still alive. Methylene blue should ideally be taken with quinine, so I had no idea if it would work. But we had nothing to lose – without medicine, Patrice was dead.

  When I arrived at Nourissat, I found Patrice’s father standing outside the wood cabin, pale and drawn. For a moment, I was afraid he would not let me in, but he opened the door for me, without saying a word, and followed me inside. I found the rest of the family gathered in one of the two small rooms the cabin was made of – a sort of nest had been made for Patrice, with warm and soft blankets, in front of the fire. The woman was kneeling beside her, rosary in hand; when I arrived she turned her enormous blue eyes towards me, and she lit up – hope was here. Except I had no idea if what I had would work. I could kill the girl by giving her too much blue, or too little. Or maybe the malaria was simply too advanced. Maybe what I had brought with me wasn’t hope, but just illusion.

  I was frightened, like I’d never been before, at university or as a practicing doctor. And still, I kept my expression strong and secure, and my hands steady, as I injected the girl’s thin, white arms with blue. I could feel the woman’s terror and the man’s hostility as the blue slowly suffused the girl’s skin, creating what looked like a faint azure cloud on her arm. Night was falling outside, and I would not leave Patrice. I sat on the floor beside her, unable to stop looking at her. Quietly, without saying a word, the girl’s mother brought me a chair, and then a cup of warm milk and a piece of bread. We all sat and waited. The day turned into night, the soft words of the rosary comforting as we waited to see whether Patrice would live or die.