Love and War in the Apennines (18 page)

When this last meal of the day was over, we used to sit in a half circle round the fire in our stockinged feet toasting them and talking about all sorts of subjects, except the war in which no one seemed to have any interest whatsoever, except that it should finish.

What they all liked to do best, except for Armando who appeared to have no extra-mural interests beyond eating and sleeping and girls (he had obviously been warned off Rita and Dolores), was to talk about England and London in particular, of which they all had some knowledge but a rather distorted vision. If London had been as they imagined, it would have been a place of such infinite mystery and excitement to me that I would never have wanted to leave it.

Among themselves they spoke of London as
la citè d’la fumarassa
, the city of smoke or fog.

‘There’s a lot of fog in London,’ Luigi would state as an incontrovertible fact and it was no good saying that there was much more fog in the valley of the Po and in Milan in wintertime than there now was in London at the same season.

What they all had was the same sort of vision of the Metropolis that I had had after reading Dickens and looking at very old bound volumes of
Punch
, one in which, at midday, the streets were filled
with a yellow, billowing vapour as thick as pea soup in which to open one’s mouth for an instant was to be asphyxiated and in which all the other inhabitants were invisible until they suddenly loomed up like ships in a fog-bound estuary, that is all except the link boys carrying flaming torches, who escorted the more well-hipped citizens about their business and gave them some protection against the footpads who could be distinguished, if the fog ever lifted sufficiently, by the thick jerseys they wore which had horizontal, alternating black and white bands on them, the knobbly cudgels they carried and nasty little wall-eyed dogs which trotted at their heels. A London in which the sulphurous darkness was filled with the stifled cries of the lower orders, the only members of the community who could open their mouths with impunity: of old women selling lavender; coalmen in leather hats droning ‘coul, coul!’ selling their black diamonds so that a million fires a day could be fed and produce the smoke which kept the fog going for twelve months of the year; fishwives extolling the virtues of baskets of bloaters; hawkers selling matches which had been made in factories by young women in conditions that were so dangerous that they rarely reached middle age, to which were added the sounds of the bells of muffin men, the music of hurdy-gurdies which were supported on a single pole stuck in the mud, the moaning of beggars, the noise made by the crossing-sweepers sweeping the crossings and the snorting of the horses which were harnessed to the ‘growlers’, the hackney carriages which plied everywhere for hire.

Behind the elegant white-painted stucco façades of the rich, which is what they would have been seen to be if only one had been able to see them, lived the heavy-jowled merchants who every day went to their places of business in the City; to banks and to warehouses which had little cranes on the upper floors to haul the merchandise up to the great store rooms above their own
comfortable sanctums in which they sat alone and in which yet more fires were burning while in the outer offices, thin, penurious clerks sat at high desks writing with quill pens in ledgers bound in vellum, debiting their master’s customers and only rarely making a credit entry in their favour, for cases of tea by the thousand, bales of wool and cotton, cargoes of spices from the Indies, coal, iron and other more exotic minerals, precious stones, wines and spirits, most of which they never actually laid eyes on, all the traffic which engrossed the occupants of the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known, over which the sun had shown no signs of setting, except to the most percipient, all payments, from whatever source, immediately being transmuted into the only coin minted in the only metal that was fit to be handled by those who had inherited the earth and most of its fruits, the
sterlina d’oro
, the golden sovereign.

And although all of this was what their vision of London conjured up for me after they had spoken about it as
la citè d’la fumarassa
, the city of smoke and fog, not what they knew about it themselves, they all knew about the golden sovereign, and one night when we were talking about the miraculous properties possessed by
sterlina d’oro
which neither moth nor rust could corrupt, nor mice consume, or become waste paper as bank notes could overnight, Agata went away to some secret hiding place and returned some time later with a whole handful of them, some embossed with the head of Queen Victoria, others with that of Edward the Seventh and George the Fifth, and even one or two with George the Sixth on them, and on the obverse of all of them was the spirited figure of St George on horseback killing the dragon with a lance and the horse trampling it disdainfully underfoot, a currency which it had been illegal for any inhabitant of the British Isles to possess for as long as I could remember. ‘They are real
sterline d’oro
, aren’t they Enrico?’ she asked anxiously. I
said that there was no doubt they were and that they were very good things to have, especially in times like these, better than Italian lire, German marks, French francs, English pounds and even American dollars unless they, too, were all gold.

‘That’s good,’ she said. She looked happier than I had ever seen her and happier than I was ever to see her again. ‘There isn’t a house in these mountains that hasn’t got some
sterline d’oro
hidden away.’

But what they really enjoyed talking about most of all was English criminals, murderers best of all. The only literature in the house besides the dream book and the one called
Barba-Nera
, the desiccated agricultural almanack which lived over the fireplace, were some old copies of a weekly magazine which was something like
La Domenica del Corriere
, the magazine which had a picture of nun being eaten by lions on the cover which had so fascinated Maria, the little mongol girl in the
ospedale Peracchi.
Some of them contained part of a series devoted to what was called
I MOSTRI CRIMINALI INGLESI
, The Monsters of English Crime, and we spent a number of happy evenings discussing them. There was Mrs Dyer, the baby farmer, who used to drown the infants committed to her charge at Caversham Weir – I remembered Mrs Dyer well – how could anyone forget her? – from visits to the Chamber of Horrors in the school holidays, a mad-looking pale wax figure, dressed in black bombazine, or what I imagined black bombazine to be, forever pushing the small black perambulator with which she went about her ghastly work; Crippen, they liked talking about him, because he used poison, something with which, as agriculturalists, they were acquainted, and Luigi described in detail how, in order to procure even the smallest quantity of poison to kill mice which, in this part of the world were as big as rats, from the Consorzio Agrario he had had to sign a book; and there was Mahon, the Crumbles murderer, who after having tried
unsuccessfully to render down his wife in pots and pans, had travelled backwards and forwards on a local train throwing various parts of her from the windows – I had seen photographs of his handiwork because one of my friends at school had a father high up in Scotland Yard and we had been given special permission to visit the Black Museum. I remembered the occasion well because when my friend’s mother had seen the photographs taken at the Crumbles she had fainted clean away.

They were all very impressed by my having seen the perambulator in the Chamber of Horrors and also the Black Museum, and this gave us the excuse for more evenings of gruesome conversation about other monsters not included in the series. But the monster they all liked best was Jack the Ripper, who was in it, because he fitted in so well with their idea of
Londra, citè d’la fumarassa
appearing out of the fog carrying a black bag to do what he was impelled to do in the dark back alleys of Houndsditch and when he had done it, vanishing into the murk from which he came, though how anyone could know, as the magazine said he did, that he carried a black bag at all, was an unexplained mystery. Feelings were very divided about the victims.

‘And good riddance to them,’ Luigi said, stoutly. ‘They were
putane
weren’t they?’ At the mention of
putane
Armando guffawed. But the girls and Agata rounded on them, angrily. ‘Poor, unfortunate girls,’ they said.
‘Putane
they might be; but who made them
putane
anyway? Evil men. And for all anyone knew they might have been mothers with children, too, and what would happen to them with their mothers dead? Much better have a
putana
for a mother than be an orphan with no mother at all.’

Then, for the time being having exhausted my repertoire of crime in England, they talked of other more homely horrors, of yawning graves and white-shrouded corpses rising from them
which someone they knew had seen in a churchyard not far off, of maniacs and persons with hideous disfigurements locked away in upper rooms and such, until Rita and Dolores were frightened to go up the stairs to bed and Agata had to go with them when the time came which, although it could not have been later than half past eight felt like midnight to me after my labours in the fields.

But in spite of the stones it was often marvellous to be working up on the Pian del Sotto: going out on to it while the morning star was still shining brilliantly in a sky that was the colour of blue-black ink; seeing the sun coming up behind Bismantova, below and far away, first illuminating the forest on the mountainside above, then flooding the plateau; sometimes rising behind dark clouds and then shining red through a hole in one of them, as if someone had opened the door of a furnace. And I liked being there when the sun was high overhead and torn white and grey clouds were racing over the mountain top from the west casting dark shadows on the pale fields, and hordes of starlings would swoop over them, and high over everything a goshawk as pale as the clouds and with wing-tips as ragged looking as they were, soared on the wind which sighed in the trees like the wind in the rigging of a sailing-ship. And I liked it, too, when the sun had gone behind the mountain and everything on the plateau was in shadow and there was a smoky blueness in the woods which were still so green in the sunlight that it was difficult to believe that autumn had come and was already well advanced.

Now the owls had taken over from the cuckoos and were hooting and there was a cool, damp smell and the bats were out in force about the house, and the sun still shone on the high peaks of the Apennines down to the south-east. And sometimes there was cloud which for days on end covered everything so
thickly that I could only see a few feet in front of me and often got lost on the way with the cart to the cliff edge, and had equal difficulty in finding my way back to the field from which I had come. And sometimes it rained, and if it was not too heavy we worked with sacks over our shoulders, even the girls when they were hoeing, replacing them with dry ones when they got too wet.

The only thing I really dreaded were the days when there was such a downpour that no work could be done out of doors. Then we used to sit in the fireless room, for even then when we were all together in it, it was never lit before the evening, everyone getting more and more bored and bad-tempered, Luigi particularly, because we were wasting his time, the girls knitting socks and sweaters, Agata working away at her vest, Luigi and Armando doing absolutely nothing, and myself trying to read Boswell’s
Tour of the Hebrides
which seemed absolutely meaningless on the Pian del Sotto, but every few minutes being interrupted by Dolores or Rita asking me what I was reading about now. What I would really like to have done would have been to stay in bed all day and sleep, but I thought that if I did this I would cause offence.

In the kitchen the air got stale; Armando would fiddle with the wireless which was supposed to be defunct but would sometimes deliver itself of great gusts of singing by what sounded like some gigantic tenor or bits of
Tannhäuser
before giving out some last dying squeaks and relapsing into silence. I would dearly liked to have heard the news. What on earth was going on down there in the south where the armies were? Even the
merenda
was no fun anymore when there was no work to make one look forward to it and at
mezzogiorno
great quarrels would sometimes break out between them all, and they would scream at one another in the
dialetto
with their mouths full of bread and soup, while I sat there
in terror hoping that they would not decide to include me because I didn’t feel like quarrelling. Something terrible had happened in the
pianura.

After I had been nearly a week at the Pian del Sotto I had still received no news from Wanda or the doctor; but on the Saturday evening the two girls went down to the village and when they returned about seven o’clock, Dolores drew from under her sweater, warm, and slightly damp, an unstamped letter addressed to a Signora Enrica, in what I immediately recognised as Wanda’s impatient handwriting which always seemed to me a too slow method of communication to keep pace with her thoughts.

The letter was written in Italian and although it purported to be addressed to a Signora it was really for me.

‘Mia cara Enrica,’
it began and I experienced a feeling of intense happiness at being addressed in this way which, although it was not more than ‘My dear Enrica,’ in English, sounded much more affectionate: ‘I have sad news of your two old friends. They are no longer with us and my mother cries continually.’ (For a terrible moment I thought that they had both been executed; but the next sentence made it clear that they hadn’t.) ‘They are now in the city and neither of them can get about as they were both accustomed to do in the past. Giorgio, the one who used to take you for rides in his motor car, has developed an illness, but you know what he is like, very imaginative. As a result of this he has left the
uncomfortable lodgings, which he didn’t like at all, and which he shared with your other friend, Bruno, who doesn’t find them comfortable either, and now Giorgio has gone to have a check-up which could result in his having an operation, although I very much doubt if he will submit to it. In my opinion he will leave the place whenever he wants to.’

Reading this I assumed that the doctor had been able to feign some complaint which required surgical treatment and had managed to have himself transferred to a hospital from which he planned to escape.

‘Bruno is in a far worse situation, although his health gives no cause for alarm at present.
But I will get him out of it
,’ Wanda wrote with menace, which boded no good for whoever had her father locked up. ‘As you know it is all the fault of that stupid; but as soon as I have overcome this problem I will try to come and see you.’

‘It is a pity,’ she went on, ‘that the little excursions which we always used to talk about are impossible at this moment. I advise you not to go too far, unaccompanied,
at your advanced age
, as these cooler, autumn days can be very treacherous, especially where you live. It is getting very late in the season to think of travelling to warmer parts which, every day, become more difficult to get to. I know that you have an impetuous nature, but do take notice of what I say to you and believe me to be your sincere,
and loving
, friend.’ Underlining this as she had the part about my advanced age, and signing her name with an indecipherable squiggle which she had probably learned in the bank and which came in very useful now.

While reading the letter I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me. It took me some time to do so and when I had finished I asked Dolores how she had come by it.

‘My cousin managed to get permission to go down to
Fontanellato to pray at the
santuario
for her brother who is with the Alpini in Russia – another reason, which she didn’t tell me, was to buy food. While she was there a signorina got talking with her, and when she found out where my cousin lived she wrote this letter which she addressed to a Signora Enrica, but was really for you, and she asked her to take it to a certain house in the valley down by the road; but when my cousin went to the house the people said that they had never heard of anyone called Signora Enrica but that there was someone called Enrico and Signor Zanoni might know where he was to be found; and then my cousin went to him and he found out that she already knew that there was someone up at the Pian del Sotto, although she didn’t know his name was Enrico; and then he told her to take the letter there and give it to Luigi, or to me, and she would have done this, but she only arrived back this afternoon and she knew that I was going down to see her this evening, anyway; so she waited.’

‘But how did your cousin know that there was someone up here?’ I said, having been made slightly dizzy by this breathless narrative.

‘She knew,’ Dolores said mysteriously, ‘and she knew that whoever it was, the letter must be for him.’

‘That’s right,’ Luigi said. ‘Everyone knows now that someone’s up here. Everyone knows everything that happens in this place. It has always been like this. If they don’t see it for themselves then the birds tell them. They would have seen you when you threw the stones over the cliff.’

Then with a village of the size of the one below the cliff, with at least a hundred people in it, perhaps more, they must all know that there was a stranger on the Pian del Sotto, and, by now, the news would have spread like convolvulus, only infinitely faster, outwards from the village to the lonelier houses, the seeds of it
carried on the wind to other villages where they would take root again and ramify until, by now, the entire region must know that I was up here.

Everyone in this room, although they showed no signs of realising it, was hopelessly compromised, and the thought that they all were, made me want to cry from sheer vexation. How much better it would have been if Luigi had told me to deposit the stones in a corner of the property, as they had been in the fields on the way up to Signor Zanoni’s house, instead of pouring them over the cliff. It would have been much harder work; but it would have been well worth it. What surprised me was how calm they all were.

‘Your
fidanzata
is very beautiful,’ said Rita, rather spitefully I thought. ‘Angiolina was telling us.
Alta, bionda
not a bit like us, dark, ugly things. She doesn’t look as if she comes from this part of the world at all, although Angiolina says she speaks like a
Parmigiana.’

‘I am
not
engaged to her,’ I said.

‘Ha, Ha!’ said Dolores. I noticed that both girls looked at me with more interest now that they knew that I had a beautiful
fidanzata
who sent me mysterious letters by devious means.

‘And you’re not ugly,’ I said. ‘You’re very good-looking girls.’ Which was true.

Actually what I said was
molto bella da vedere
which was unfortunate, as it made them sound like food that looked better than it tasted. And they seized on this, happily.

‘Oh, we may not be so bad to look at, although it’s only you who say so, but we’re not well-educated like your
fidanzata.
We can’t write letters like she can.’ And so on. Both of them were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

I had never been very good at standing up to this peculiarly feminine form of bear-baiting but fortunately it was Agata, who
was of a more practical turn of mind, who came to my rescue, although not in the way I would have wished.

‘What did your intended write in the letter?’ she asked. ‘What sort of news? Was it good or bad?’

I was in a dilemma. If I told them the truth they would become really alarmed and believe that there was an incriminating trail which led directly from Fontanellato to the Pian del Sotto. Yet it was obvious from Wanda’s letter that the reason her father and the doctor had been imprisoned was that their names had been in the little book kept by that stupid. What was really bad was that so many people knew that there was a stranger among them, and now that the girls had been down to the village and had talked to Dolores’s cousin, and goodness knows who else, it seemed more than likely that everyone knew that I was not an Italian fisherman who had been blown up by an Allied bomb in a raid on Genoa, but an Englishman with a desirable price on his head. What I now needed was time to think out what I ought to say but there was none. I had to reply to Agata’s question immediately.

This time it was the girls who saved me. Seeing me grow red with embarrassment (I could feel myself blushing), and hesitating to reply they assumed that the contents of the letter had been of too intimate a nature to be imparted to anyone else, or pretended to, and they turned on Agata and upbraided her for having the face to ask such a question, which had seemed a perfectly reasonable one to me; at the same time giving themselves more of the sadistic pleasure which they had obtained while denigrating themselves.

‘But no!’ they said. ‘Poor boy! How can you ask him such a question? How would you have liked it if someone had asked you when you were young all the beautiful things your
fidanzato
had written to you? For shame!’

‘Luigi couldn’t write,’ Agata said.

‘SHE IS NOT MY
FIDANZATA
,’ I said loudly for the umpteenth time, but none of them took any notice and a full-scale shouting match developed, in which everyone joined except me, about the importance of personal privacy, during which the question of what was actually in the letter was soon forgotten and no one referred to it again.

Luckily, the next day was a Sunday, when no manual work was done, apart from milking the cows and feeding the animals, not even on the Pian del Sotto, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to go away for the day, somewhere up the mountain above the house, which was something I had wanted to do even before this crisis had arisen. If I did stay at the house I would be the only person left in it for a good part of the day and I would be virtually a prisoner because, when they all went down to one or other of the villages, Nero was let off the hook, and Luigi and Armando were the only ones who knew how to put him on the chain again.

They all had different reasons for going. Agata and the girls went to attend mass, in one of the lower villages and on the way back the girls used to look out for any boys who might be about, all of whom would be deserters, living in a stage of semi-concealment rather similar to my own and like me ready to take to their heels at a moment’s notice. All the other young men were still away, some having been unable to escape from their units at the Armistice, some prisoners, some still in the Balkans, and some lost in Russia, members of General Garibaldi’s luckless Eighth Italian army, which had been overrun on the Don, none of whom had been heard of since December, 1942, and most of whom were never heard of again. The men did not go to mass unless they were very old. Here, in the mountains, as in the
pianura
, religion
was for women; among the men it was reserved for feast days and for death. Luigi would be going to the local inn to meet his cronies, and play a noisy card game called
briscola.
And Armando would be going down to look at the girls, of whom, he told me, there was a good selection, one or two of whom, according to him, ‘did it’. Armando told me that he would like to ‘do it’ with Dolores.

‘I’d like to screw her and screw her and screw her and screw her and screw her,’ he said, banging the side of one of the bullocks with a clenched fist, as if to emphasise how much he would like to do it.

‘You’re as bad as the English,’ I said. ‘You want to eat five times a day.’

‘She looks as if she does it; but she doesn’t, at least not with me,’ he said, gloomily. ‘I can’t understand it.’

When I suggested going away for the day to Agata she seemed quite pleased. I don’t think she much liked the idea of leaving me alone in the house. I might set fire to it or I might even try to unearth her cache of
sterlina d’oro.
Whatever the reasons she very willingly gave me a picnic to see me through the day; and I set off at about nine o’clock with the provisions and all the rest of my belongings in a real Italian army rucksack which Luigi had used in the first war when he was in the
Alpini
and which, although it had been slightly gnawed by rats, was still serviceable.

I looked quite smart when I set off. I had shaved and I had on my own clothes, or rather the ones that Wanda’s father had given me, because Luigi said it would not look right if I met anybody in the woods wearing his ragged suit on a Sunday, although, to my mind, I looked even more conspicuous; neither like a local inhabitant, nor someone out for the day from a town.

‘You can wear your old suit tomorrow when you’re working on the stones again,’ he said, and I thought I detected a note of
anxiety in his voice, as if I was perhaps planning not to return, and I was flattered to feel that although my job was a menial one I had at least managed to make myself more or less indispensable, for no one else could be spared to do it.

It was a marvellous, cloudless day, more like a day in midsummer than one getting on towards the middle of October, and it was going to be very hot. I went up across the fields in which I had worked all the week, looking at them now with a much more professional eye than when I had first arrived. How different they looked, those I had weeded of stones and Armando had ploughed and harrowed, using the trunk of a small tree, and those the girls had worked on afterwards using mattocks with long prongs to break the earth up. Then I scrambled up the steep bank and took one last look at the house before entering the woods at the place where I always hid my sack of personal possessions during the day in the shallow hole which I had dug for this purpose on that first afternoon, covering it with planks and earth, just as Giovanni and his father had done when they had buried me that night down by the river.

The trees were mostly beeches but not the great tall English beeches. These were much smaller; but the bark had the same pale, luminous quality, and there were some oaks, too. These woods were nothing like the one below the Pian del Sotto, or the even worse wood below the Colle del Santo, through which Luigi had cut a path up from the river. Here there were no brambles and the ground was covered with moss.