Love and War in the Apennines (22 page)

This was not the first time I had seen her in this outfit. I saw her like this almost every evening when it was fine, washing herself at the trough, together with Rita, before going inside for the evening meal, but I had always endeavoured to put her out of my mind.

This had not been as difficult as the reader might imagine. Apart from the fact that my thoughts were with Wanda, my unofficial
fidanzata
, I would not have allowed myself to even try to do what I was undoubtedly engaged in doing at this moment, if for no other reason than it would have been a gross abuse of hospitality which was being offered to me at tremendous risk and
which, if it was discovered by my host and hostess and the facts were broadcast, could have a disastrous effect on the whole relationship between prisoners of war and those who were helping them. I had not even had to work this out for myself. Even before we left the
orfanotrofio
the colonel had gone to great pains to impress on us all that we must behave with the utmost punctiliousness in any dealings we had with the civilian population, and, indeed, after the prisoners made their first contact with them in the yard of the farmhouse near Fontanellato where the food and clothing depot was set up, his warning seemed superfluous. Anyone who did otherwise would have had to be possessed of a heart of stone. I myself was probably on terms of greater intimacy with Wanda than any of the other prisoners were with the girls of Fontanellato, but they were such that not even the
superiora
or her
suore
could possibly take exception to them, although I had kissed her; but even they did not know this. And at the Pian del Sotto my relationship with Rita and Dolores had been equally formal until they had begun to tease me about my
‘fidanzata’
, as they insisted on calling her, and it was not only the previous day when they had begun to ask me which of them I was going to take to the dance that for a few moments I felt the atmosphere between us as we
zappa
’d away, to be charged with sexuality.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

I thought I had been doing so.

With all these thoughts whirling through my mind, and out again, I really kissed Dolores.

‘More,’ she said.

She turned over until she was more or less lying on top of me which, unless I had had something like seven feet of hay under me would probably have done me an injury. Now I was drowning in long auburn hair. She smelled delicious, better than the girls in Alexandria I used to take out with their seemingly inexhaustible
supply of expensive scent, a compound of herself, honest out-door sweat, which was nothing like the awful body odours of urban civilisation, wood smoke, creamy milk and clean byres, and over everything hung the sweet smell of hay and I didn’t even have hay fever. The season was over. Somewhere, far off, I could hear Nero howling. What an escape I had had. Out of the frying pan into the fire.

‘More,’ she said again. She was a great girl. In another age, when big girls were appreciated as they deserved to be, she would have been plucked from the fields to be the mistress of a king. This was the kind of girl in search of whom Saracenic pirates had put landing parties ashore and, having taken her, would have stowed her away under hatches in their galleys intact and undamaged, or more or less, to be auctioned in a Near Eastern market place and to become the principal ornament in a harem of a pasha, or even a sultan who recognised quantity and quality when he set eyes on it.

‘Touch me,’ she said. It seemed superfluous. To me we appeared to be touching at all the points at which human beings could possibly be in contact with one another. What marvellous, strong legs she had.

‘Let’s go into the barn,’ she said, after a while. It seemed unnecessary when we were invisible to every other living thing, except for a few spiders and the doves which had come back under the eaves of the lean-to from which they had scattered in alarm and where they were now cooing sensuously, providing a sort of background music for us, where none was necessary, sunk in a couch of hay as ample and probably much more comfortable than the Great Bed of Ware.

I was spared the necessity of deciding where the next round would take place, although there was little doubt what the outcome would be, by the gong, as it were, which saved us both
– in this case Agata, who had returned to the house together with Rita, burdened with washing, to find that Nero was on the loose. She, I was glad to hear, was as frightened as I had been and was now announcing the fact from within the safety of its four walls:

‘AHMAANDO! EEENRICCO! DOLLORESSS! E SCAPPATO NERO!’

Although what she expected me to do about it, except take to the trees, was not clear. Even Dolores dared not turn a deaf ear to Agata. She gave me one more kiss and then sat up, hitching her vest, which had got a bit disarranged, up on her shoulders. ‘Never mind,’ she said, throwing her magnificent hair back in a way which could only be described as pert, and looking like something in
La Vie Parisienne
, ‘You can bring me home tomorrow night, after the ball. Rita
will
be angry.’ And she went down over the edge of the hay like a commando scrambling on the side of an assault ship and into a landing craft, leaving me to follow and compose whatever sort of alibi I pleased.

When the time came for the girls to set off for the
ballo
the following night I still had not the slightest intention of accompanying them. Any temptation that I might have had previously to do so had been extinguished by the happenings of the previous afternoon, although there had been no difference in Dolores’s behaviour towards me, nor in Rita’s, which was a good sign. They were neither more nor less saucy as we
zappa
’d together and the only mention of the dance was between themselves in the
dialetto.
I think they were discussing what they should wear. I began to wonder if the events in the lean-to had never happened at all but were the product of wishful thinking or a disordered imagination, or a mixture of both.

But that evening, after supper, they both went up to change
and when they returned, Dolores in a dress of flaming green, Rita in a brilliant red one, which suited her dark looks very well, both lipsticked up rather inexpertly, and with their hair arranged in an extravagant fashion, Dolores’s being particularly involved and towering because she had so much of it, and they asked me if I was ready, I didn’t know what to say. Armando had already gone on ahead to make his number with whoever he was taking to the dance.

I plucked up what was left of my courage, as I knew I had to, and said that I couldn’t go and the reasons why which they already knew but were not interested in, and then to my surprise, Agata, who in my mind I had cast as an ugly sister who would have been glad if the whole business had collapsed, having been rather more than cool about the
ballo
up to now, said that I should go, what was the harm in it, and then when Luigi came down on her side and said that he thought that it would be safe enough (‘All the other boys who are going to be there are hiding from the Germans just like you.’) I had to agree, secretly pleased, although the immediate future looked extremely hazardous in more ways than one. I felt like a navigator who had left his charts behind entering a narrow strait filled with dangerous reefs.

I had already washed and shaved, too, because it was Saturday and I was wearing my own clothes. (There was time enough to explain to Luigi why it was that half the turn-up on the left leg of the trousers of the suit he had lent me was missing.) It only remained for me to take my rucksack, or rather Luigi’s rucksack, which I had hung on to since that first Sunday, up to the top of the plateau and hide it; but it was a dark misty night, very wet underfoot, and when I got back to where the girls were waiting for me on the path outside the house, where Nero was making the night hideous, my boots were so thickly coated with clay that they felt as if they were soled with lead.

The girls were wearing their best coats, but they, too, wore boots and carried their dancing shoes under their arms wrapped in newspaper. Far more capable than I was of walking down the track to the Colle del Santo in the darkness, something which they had both done innumerable times, they nevertheless each put one of their arms in mine, as if to emphasise the fact that for this night at any rate they were not a couple of hardy country girls who could do anything that had to be done at the Pian del Sotto better than I could, but a pair of fragile females in need of male support and protection, and to make themselves seem even more dependant they pretended to see apparitions lurking among the trees and uttered little squeaks of terror. But not for long. After I had stumbled a few times it was they who held me up and they became as helpless with laughter as they had been when the whole business of which of them I was going to take to the dance had been discussed; and we went lurching down the hill together, making a terrible noise, like a trio of drunks.

Nevertheless, with all the laughing and joking and screaming, I began to realise that there was a difference in what was happening to my left arm which Rita was squeezing just sufficiently to show that she was there and appreciated my gallantry, but not sufficiently to encourage me to have any other thoughts about anything except keeping her upright; and my right arm which Dolores had contrived to entwine in her own so that it was like a sapling enmeshed by some giant, South American creeper. She was now enthusiastically playing a children’s game called ‘Round and round the Garden, like a Teddy Bear’, or rather the first part of it, drawing the tip of one of the fingers of her other hand round and round the palm of my own in a way which I found terribly disturbing and not evocative of the nursery at all, and at the same time chattering away innocently nineteen to the dozen with Rita which was even more rousing. I was so disturbed that my disquiet, if one
can call it that, must have communicated itself to Rita and she began to give my other hand lingering squeezes which I could only describe as encouraging but, mercifully, without engaging in the operations at which Dolores was so adept and which were giving me such exquisite torments. In this state of increasing mutual excitement we descended the mountain, towards the dance. At any other time I would have thought myself in heaven.

At the cross-roads at the Colle del Santo, where the shrine was – the saint would probably have fallen out of his niche if he had had any inkling of what was going through my mind – we turned right on the track which led to the village and after a few minutes came to the farmhouse from which the sound of music and laughter could be heard, although there was not a chink of light to be seen. Here, Rita banged on the door which was immediately opened and we found ourselves in the midst of the
ballo
which was already going full blast.

We were in a kitchen half as large again as the one at the Pian del Sotto and it looked even larger because most of the furniture had been removed from it. The room was brilliantly lit by a paraffin pressure-lantern. There was no fire in the hearth and there was no need of one because the number of people in the room, and the lantern which gave off an enormous glow, made it stiflingly hot.

The party consisted of about eight or nine young men and about fifteen girls, and they were all dancing, even the girls without male partners were dancing with one another. The music was provided by two elderly men sitting on a small platform made from upturned boxes working away furiously, one on a fiddle, the other with an accordion. Around the wall were a number of men and women, most of them about the same age as Luigi and Agata, and some older women, like dowagers, sitting immobile on chairs and stools. The austere room with the brilliant, hissing light, the frantic sound
of the fiddle, the laughing gyrating couples and the older people disposed along the walls watching them, resembled the drawing by Phiz in A
Christmas Carol
of the dance in Mr Fezziwig’s warehouse. It was a lively, ingenuous, happy scene.

It was a great
ballo.
Nothing like the gruesome shufflings which I had learned to call dancing and to which I had grown accustomed in innumerable dark cellars in Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut, in the course of which one was expected by one’s partner to talk incessantly and, if possible, wittily. Here, there was no opportunity for talking during the dances, they were too energetic, and there were no intermissions. I danced with big girls, although only one of them had anything like the unique marriage of qualities possessed by Dolores; thin girls, one or two of them mean-looking in a desirable way (Armando had arrived with one of these); normal-sized girls and small girls, some of whom were so tiny that I was so afraid of crushing their feet with my great boots that I held them at arms’ length until they took offence, reminded me that they were girls and no eggshells, and drew me close to them. All, large and small, fat and thin, were marvellous dancers, better than any of the boys, better than I could ever hope to be, but they all gave me a good squeeze and expected to be squeezed back, and everyone else except the girls who were dancing together as a temporary expedient, was squeezing one another too.

When I danced with Rita she took the opportunity to holler in my ear, the only way anyone could make themselves heard in such a din, that if I would like to, I could escort her back to the Pian del Sotto after the dance (I had already danced with Dolores, which was rather like being mixed up in a whirlwind, who had also reminded me at the top of her voice that I was taking her home afterwards). Up to then with all the fun and excitement I had forgotten that I had an almost insoluble problem on my hands. Who was I going to travel with on the way back to the
house? If I went with either of the two girls it would have to be Dolores who had, as it were already booked me for this purpose. Yet it was unthinkable to desert Rita in favour of one of her parents’ employees. What would they say if they heard that I had left their daughter to make her own way back in the darkness. I decided that when the time came, whatever happened, the only proper course would be to take both of them together, one on one arm, the other on the other, and hope for the best. Perhaps the whole thing was an elaborate torture, a dilemma they had decided to put me into that day while they had been banging away with their
zappas
in the field, screaming with laughter at their own private jokes in the
dialetto.
Certainly the delicious time I had spent with Dolores in the hay had not been of her contriving, any more than it had been of mine and I wondered, as I whirled around the floor with them in succession, whether Dolores had told Rita about what had happened and that they had decided to weave it into the fabric of what might very well turn out to be an involved practical joke, with Luigi and Agata and Armando all in on it and all roaring with laughter, like members of an Edwardian house party on a lawn welcoming a guest whom they had deliberately bamboozled, or a bevy of sergeants welcoming back a recruit whom they had sent out to whitewash the Last Post. Or were they both engaged in giving one another the double-cross? The combinations and permutations were almost infinite, far too numerous, anyway, to be resolved while engaged in such high jinks as we all were at this moment. And why didn’t they pick on a couple of the other boys at the dance, all of whom they obviously knew, some of whom they obviously liked, and most of whom they equally obviously thoroughly enjoyed dancing with. So far as I could see there was little to choose between us. We were all equally red in the face from the heat and our exertions. It was a bit of a mystery.