Love and War in the Apennines (12 page)

‘Avanti! Avanti!’
said the voice,
‘buona notte!’

Beyond the village we left the main road, such as it was, and entered a labyrinth of small lanes in which I was once more allowed to come to the surface. The country was much lonelier now; the air was colder and there was low-lying fog which was dense in places.

We drove for some time along a road on top of a dyke, the biggest I had yet seen, high above the tops of the trees which grew in the low ground on either side. Then we turned off it down a sort of ramp and followed a long, straight, ride through plantations of poplars for about three miles until, finally, in the middle of one of them at a place where a million frogs all seemed to be
croaking at once, we stopped. Here the doctor handed me my pack which had somehow been rescued from the
orfanotrofio
, together with my boots, without which I would be done for. Luckily neither my pack nor my boots had been in my room; the
superiora
had thought them too dirty. The only things they hadn’t been able to salvage were the clothes in which I had arrived at the
ospedale
, which had been in a cupboard in my room.

Now Wanda’s father gave me a complete change of clothes which included a black jacket and striped trousers of the sort that bank managers wore, which were obviously his best, and told me to put them on. I felt a pig taking them from him but there was no time to argue, and I had no choice anyway, and he and the doctor both waited impatiently while I stripped off my pyjamas, which they stowed away under one of the seats of the car. He also gave me a knife; but, as he said, it was intended for cutting food and not a weapon of offence. And the doctor gave me a small bottle.

‘You may need this,’ he said grimly. ‘There are many mosquitoes. Put it on your face and hands.’ He spoke very slowly and simply so that I could take in what he said. ‘At noon tomorrow a man will come here. He will whistle three times, as if he was whistling to his dog, like this.’ At this point he gave a rather muted imitation of what it would sound like.

‘Has he got a dog?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he glared at me in the moonlight, angry at such an irrelevance. ‘This man is about forty-five,’ he went on, ‘and he has a big moustache. You can call him Giovanni. If it is safe he may take you to his house. I will fetch you tomorrow night. There is enough food and water in your pack to last you until he comes, but don’t use it all because he may not come, and neither may I. Don’t drink the water in the ditches. If anything happens to either of us,’ he indicated the
maestro
who stood like a sawn-off monolith
in the moonlight, ‘you will hear from his daughter. If anything happens to her someone else will come. We are going to try to get you into the castle at Soragna, or else to Switzerland. You have had a long journey tonight – I’m sorry we had to go all that way round, but you are still not more than twenty kilometres from the hospital.’

I have a good sense of direction and this did not surprise me. Then they shook hands with me. It was not my idea to shake hands, but I was pleased when they offered them. To tell the truth, I was becoming fed up with their more than Anglo-Saxon phlegm. Then they got into the car and the doctor drove up the track until he found a place wide enough to turn the car. I didn’t want to go to Switzerland, but this did not seem the right time to say so.

As he passed me on the way back, the car lurching in the potholes, I remembered to ask him where I was, which was something that would be important to me if they failed to return and if Giovanni, the man with the moustache and no dog, also failed to appear.

‘You are about six hundred metres from the Po,’ he said, ‘and about twenty-five kilometres upstream from the bridges at Casalmaggiore. The nearest village is in that direction.’ He pointed into the wood. ‘Don’t go to it.’ ‘One thing,’ he said, just as he was moving off, ‘whatever you do, if we don’t come back, don’t try to cross the Po. Make for the mountains.’

When they were gone I went down into the wood. The moon was shining between the boles of the trees, even more rusty-looking and decrepit than it had been, but powerful enough to lay bare the lack of amenity. Apart from being very lonely, which was why I was in the wood, it was very cold; very wet, because it was irrigated by a network of shallow ditches, and incredibly noisy – by comparison the croaking of the frogs outside the
ospedale
had been a mere gurgling, but even the racket these frogs made
was not loud enough to drown the noise of the gigantic mosquitoes which, mad for human blood, dived on me with a high-pitched screaming sound, remarkably like that made by the Stukas when they used to come howling down out of the late afternoon sun to bomb the harbour at Tobruk. There the navy, primed with Plymouth gin, used to blaze away with Lewis guns from which the cooling jackets had been removed in order to make them more handy for a quick right and left. Here, my only defence against these monsters, was a bottle of oil of citronella; but I was past caring. The alarms and excursions of the evening had worn me down. One place was as good as another to me at this moment, so I laid out the blanket which the
maestro
had given me, got into my sleeping-bag, which after my boots was my most treasured possession, rubbed my arms, hands and face with oil of citronella, put my head in my pack to shield it from the mosquitoes, and fell asleep.

When I woke and pulled the pack off my head it was already light, but there was a dense fog and it was very quiet. It was like being wrapped in cotton wool. The frogs had stopped croaking and the mosquitoes had gone. The air was cold but I was glad that it was. After having slept with my head in the pack I had a splitting headache and a horrible mouth; otherwise, apart from one or two giant mosquito bites on my neck, I was unscathed.

I stayed in my sleeping-bag until the fog began to turn yellow in the light of the rising sun. Then I got up, cleaned my teeth, rolled up the sleeping-bag, which was very wet, put on my left boot and set off through the wood, parallel to the track, in what I imagined must be the direction of the river. My other foot was a soggy amalgam of mud and plaster, but I no longer cared. It didn’t hurt anymore. The rough treatment which it had received ever since I had injured it seemed to have done it good.

After about twenty minutes I emerged on the edge of a driedout backwater of the river. The banks were loose shingle and the bottom was filled with big, round stones which I found difficult to cross. The far bank was covered with a dense growth of what looked to me like dwarf acacia trees, in which I lost myself in a maze of sheep runs which led nowhere. It was a creepy place full
of dung, but after blundering about in it for a bit I suddenly came out on the right bank of the river.

It was a marvellous, unforgettable sight, especially for someone like myself who had seen nothing for a year except walls, barbed wire and, at the best, a rather humdrum domestic country. I was on an inside curve of a big bend of the river. Here it was about 250 yards wide. Although it was low, it was running strongly. The water was the colour of milky coffee, and in places it erupted and formed whirlpools which whirled for a time before they collapsed, and on its surface there were gouts of foam, like clotted cream which the current seized on and swept away. The fog was going now, rolling away upstream to the west in a series of giant billows, all golden in the sun. Downstream was the dried-out channel I had just crossed, with a deep pool in a sort of bay at the mouth of it, from which a long spur of stone embankment curved away. It was unfinished, and on top of it there were piles of fascines that looked like sausage rolls filled with stones, and the remains of the workmen’s fires, although no work seemed to have been done on the embankment for some time. Behind it there was a plantation of willows in which the saplings had been cut down to make the fascines. On both banks there were diamond-shaped navigational marks painted red and white, and in midstream there were buoys at which the current was pulling so hard that some of them were almost under water.

As the fog dispersed the river was revealed with dark woods of poplar looming up on either side of it, between which it flowed as if through a series of canyons. The landscape was scarcely European, the river was too powerful-looking to be Italian, although it might conceivably have been Russian. It was a river of the New World painted by a romantic artist of the nineteenth century. Swifts dipped over the water, a great heron beat its way slowly up a backwater between a wooded island and the shore,
snowy white little egrets stood motionless in the shallows, and on the far bank a flock of sheep were grazing at the foot of a big, grass-covered dyke, similar to the one from which we had come down into the wood the night before, but which here formed a salient at the water’s edge from which it ran away inland on either side; and from behind it, from the invisible chimneys of an invisible village, thin columns of bluish smoke rose into the windless air. Upstream, on the right bank of the river there was a huge fishing net in a circular frame, like an upturned umbrella and behind it, half-hidden among the trees, there was a flimsy hut on stilts.

Soon the sun was hot and I decided to swim. It was a crazy thing to do, but there was no one about. I crossed over to the pool at the mouth of the backwater, took off my clothes and plunged in. It was icy. Perhaps it seemed colder than it was because I was rather thin. Then I dressed, ate some food from my pack and hobbled back to the wood.

The plaster of paris was like a great lump of chewed nougat, and I cut it off, using the knife that the
maestro
had given me. Then I lay down under the trees to wait for Giovanni.

It was deliciously cool there. The sun beat down on the tops of the poplars, but they were so close together that it only succeeded here and there in sending down long shafts of dappled light into the green, damp shadow of the wood. Their slender trunks soared upwards like columns and the intervals between them were dim, green aisles. It was like being in a cathedral that had been engulfed by the sea. Then I fell asleep.

I was awakened by someone tugging at my arm. Standing over me there was a man with a big brown moustache, and with a thick head of hair which was just beginning to go grey above the ears.

‘You sleep too strongly,’ he said. ‘I have been whistling for ten minutes and I am tired of it. I am called Giovanni. I have brought you a picnic,’ he said. He called it
una merenda.
‘We shall eat it by the river. Then later we shall go to my house.’

He was dressed in an old suit of snuff-coloured velveteen and over his shoulder he had a sack which presumably contained the
merenda.
He was a powerful-looking man, above five feet eight but with a chest like a barrel and a long scar down one side of his nose. He walked with a limp. We went back towards the river, more or less by the route which I had followed before. My ankle now hurt abominably, but at least it stood up to being used just as well without the plaster.

Eventually we reached the bank of the dry backwater that I had already crossed, but farther upstream. Here, beyond the shadow of the trees, the light was incandescent; the stones so hot that I felt they might explode. On the far side there was a path through the dwarf trees, and after following it for a bit we came out in a small clearing behind the hut I had seen earlier which stood high above the embankment on a little forest of piles.

‘My house in the country,’ Giovanni said. He went up a ladder to it and unlocked the door. Inside there was a room about eight feet square with a bunk on one side, some cooking pots, a fishing rod, a pair of decayed rubber waders, and that was about all.

‘C’è ura d’mangar
.’ ‘Time to eat,’ he said. He spoke the dialect which here, on the river bank, sounded even deeper and more mysterious than it had at the farm on the first night that I was free. I told him I couldn’t understand it and he said that, in future, he would speak Italian, and very slowly.

We sat outside in the shade and ate a delicious meal, the best of its kind that I could remember. Everything was home-made.

‘È nostrano
,’ he said, whenever he offered me anything. No wonder he had brought a sack. We ate a delicious, thick soup full
of vegetables and
pasta
that was made in the shape of sea shells which he ladled from a pot; and we ate
polenta
, a sort of solidified yellow porridge made from maize, which he sliced with a piece of wire; wonderful hard white bread, made from something called
pasta dura
and with it slices of
culatello
, a kind of unsmoked ham from part of the pig’s behind that was cut so thinly that it was almost transparent which, he said, was a local speciality; and there was another sort called
spalla
, made from the shoulder which he said was the sort that Verdi preferred; but I thought the
culatello
was the best.

‘It’s good, the
culatello,’
he said, relapsing into the dialect and offering me more.

We drank
lambrusco
from a black bottle which held two litres. The cork was similar to a champagne cork but without the metal cap with the maker’s name on it, and it was prevented from blowing out of the mouth of the bottle by strong thread which was lashed down over the top of it and round the lip. The Italian word for cork was
turacciolo
but he called it
bouchon
in the dialect which seemed to have a lot of French words in it. The wine was deep purple and it seethed in the glasses with its own natural gas. The same wine the farmer had given me on that first night. And then we ate cheese that had been maturing for two years in one of his barns.

Afterwards we lay on our stomachs on the grass on the slope of the embankment, looking out over the top of it across the river, and he told me about his life. It took a long time; because he found Italian difficult.

Before the war he had been one of the men employed on the river in rowing boats to shift the leading marks and buoys for the barges which went up to Mantova, which had to be done constantly because the bed of the stream was always changing. It was a hard way of earning a living which he had combined with that of being
a fisherman. His wife had died in childbirth in 1937. Until six months ago he had been in the navy with some special force rather like the one I had been captured with, training on a lonely part of the west coast, when somebody had dropped a snatch block on his foot and he had been invalided out. Now he lived with his mother and with his father who had been both fisherman and farmer, in a house near the dyke. He was anti-German, anti-Mussolini, anti-King and anti-Badoglio who, he considered, had betrayed Italy and then left it in the soup.

‘From now on I’m Communist,’ he said. I would have liked to have talked to him more about this, but that was all he would say and I was really content to leave it at that. The war seemed far away. It might never have happened. Looking out on this dreamlike landscape it was difficult to believe that a few miles away
feldgendarmen
and
carabinieri
were after one’s blood. And they might be even closer.

Occasionally, far off, I could hear a train rumbling across some bridge, whistling mournfully. Otherwise, there were no sounds, not even the barking of a dog to disturb the silence of that long, golden afternoon, during which I sometimes dozed and sometimes listened to Giovanni as he droned on, with lots of careful explanation, about his beloved river, while the river itself slid past like molten metal. About how powerful it was, how many mouths it had on the Adriatic, some dying, others already dead, as every year the silt extended further and further, sixty metres and more a year, out to sea – a lighthouse which had been built a hundred and fifty metres from the sea in 1882, twenty years later was more than three kilometres inland. This was one of the reasons for the great floods with which the valley was afflicted.

Even when it was in normal flood in October or November the wood in which I had slept would be deep under water, and from the main dyke beyond it to the one on the other bank where
it ran away from the salient where the village was, at least three kilometres would be like an inland sea.

‘That’s the time when I take down my little hut,’ he said, ‘otherwise it would end up in the Adriatic.’

In winter it was bitterly cold here and there were terrible fogs – there was fog about seventy days a year – which obliterated everything. Down near the mouth of the river, in the delta were the
valli
, vast enclosures of brackish water, separated by dykes. In winter these shallows were invaded by clouds of migrant duck and wild geese and men like Giovanni, who was mad for shooting, waited, shivering, for the flights at dawn and dusk, or else stalked them, using punts. The
valli
were also the hunting grounds of men called
fiocinini
, fish poachers, who took eels by night from under the noses of the keepers of the
valli.
On dark, stormy nights in November millions of eels were on the move in the river valley, all travelling eastwards on the first stage of their journey to the Sargasso Sea where, in the depths of the Atlantic, they would beget their young; a journey from which only the new-born eels returned.

‘No one knows what happens to those that make the journey,’ Giovanni said, ‘but some don’t go at all and they become as fat as eunuchs.’

Of those that did make the journey, thousands and thousands were caught in the great eel traps at Comacchio in the
valli.
Once thirty-four tons of eels were taken there in a single night, and to celebrate the catch a mortar was fired and wine distributed. And he spoke about the other fish that inhabited the river; carp, pike, fish called
cavadane
and
pescegatto
and the big sturgeon that sometimes came up it. Finally, aroused by so much talk of fish, he showed me how the big net worked which I had seen from further downstream that morning, which was what he called a
bilancione
because it was operated by counterbalance weights. He
let fly some tackle and the net lowered itself into the water like a giant, prehistoric bird fishing and then, when he hauled on a rope, it rose again.

By this time the sun was setting. The air was becoming chilly and there was a mistiness in the woods far off up and down stream.

‘Anduma a cà
,’ said Giovanni. ‘Let’s go home.’ He threw the remains of the picnic, which was not much, into the river, put the pot which had contained the soup back into his sack, locked up his hut and set off through the trees. It was one of the best days I could ever remember, and I hated the thought that it was almost at an end.

But at the house, when we got to it, there was disastrous news, brought by Wanda whose bicycle I recognised propped against the wall outside, and who had cycled twenty kilometres to do so.

Early that morning before it was light and while everyone was still in bed, a mixed force of Germans and Fascists had descended on the neighbourhood of Fontanellato and surrounded the house of a farmer called Baruffini in which they found several prisoners. Then they beat the surrounding fields in which a number of others were sleeping under the vines. Altogether their total bag was thirteen. But worst of all one of the prisoners had been mad enough to keep a day-to-day journal of all his doings in clear, which gave the names of a number of people who had helped him and which he had not even had the presence of mind to hide or destroy when he was taken. As a result of this, further arrests had been made and more were thought to be imminent.
¹