Love and War in the Apennines (24 page)

I told him that I had no intention of returning. So far as I was concerned he had done enough for one war.

‘I thought you might not want to,’ he said. ‘And because I was afraid that something like this might happen, I went to see a relative of ours, Agata’s brother-in-law, two days ago, the day Nero broke his chain, when I was up on the mountain seeing about the wood. He’s a shepherd and he’s got a lot of sheep up there on the mountain and he’s been living up there all the summer. His name’s Abramo. He’ll be bringing the animals down to his place almost any time now, as soon as the weather breaks; but I told him about you and he said that if you were in trouble he would be glad to look after you for a bit. No one sees him for weeks at a time and no one ever really knows where he is because he has several huts in different places and he moves the animals about a lot. At the moment he’s at a place called the Castello del Prato and you should start out early tomorrow morning for it, as soon as it’s getting light. He’s got plenty of food up there. Now I’ll tell you how to get there. It’s high up, the Castello del Prato.’

He had been arranging all this for me while I had been tumbling in the hay with Dolores. I was glad that he couldn’t see my face in the darkness.

The directions were easy to follow. I had to go up by the same route through the woods that I had followed the day I met
Oberleutnant
Frick, and when I got on to the open downs where the yew trees were, instead of turning left, I had to continue up over them. In this way I would eventually come out on the edge of the cliff at a place where there were some prominent rocks and a small beech wood. This was the Castello del Prato and, according to Luigi, it was about half an hour’s climb from the top of the wood.

He had brought me some bread and sausage and a small flask of wine. If I needed water during the night I could get it from the spring on the edge of the wood above the house. ‘But watch out,’ he said. ‘There could be an ambush, though I don’t think so. The
Tedeschi
were all very wet and looking forward to getting home, that’s what the Italian said.’

‘We shall miss you,’ he said. ‘Agata and the girls have been crying and the girls wanted to come here with me but I wouldn’t allow it.’

It was difficult to imagine Agata crying and I felt awful being the instrument which had caused her and the girls to do so. At this moment I felt like having a good cry myself.

‘Give them all my love,’ I said. It sounded wrong in Italian. ‘And thank the signora for everything.’

‘They thought you would like to have this,’ he said, fishing around in a pocket of his suit. Although I could only see him in outline and it was raining, I was sure that it was as clean and unmuddied as it always was, ‘The
Barba-Nera.
You always seemed to enjoy reading it. And I’ve brought you the clothes you worked in. I thought they might be useful.’

‘You’ve torn the trousers,’ he said severely. ‘That’s a good suit, that is. How did you do it?’ He sounded like my father.

‘It was Nero.’

‘I’m going to get rid of Nero.’

‘Good idea, much too savage,’ I said.

‘Savage!’ he said. ‘Since the
Tedesco
spoke to him he hasn’t moved from his kennel. I’m going to shoot him as soon as I can get a real, hard dog. I know where there is one.’

This was the old Luigi I knew.

‘Lucky you finished the stones before all this happened,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we would have had to have done it ourselves.’ He shook hands with me and went away.

It must have been about an hour after sunrise the following morning when I emerged from the forest on to the downs where the yew trees grew; but there was no sun and therefore no way of knowing. It was one of those days, which were becoming more frequent now, when everything was swaddled in thick, grey cloud and in the forest it lay even thicker so that going up through it I had the feeling that I was swimming in cold gruel. The forest was no longer the arcadian place it had been on that first Sunday of my day off. Now the tunnels under the trees were as dank and vaporous and foetid as the passages in a workhouse, and everything had an air of decay. The moss which had been so brilliantly green now had a dull, brownish tinge and gave off a disagreeable, sickly smell; and the fungi which had appeared so beautiful and strange with the sun slanting down on them, now seemed positively evil, the fruits of corruption, even the ones that I knew to be edible because, having eaten them, I was still alive. Now after the rain, there were fresh, and to me even more monstrous-looking growths, although, no doubt, they were edible too, enormous puff balls, which had emerged in the clearings of the charcoal burners, the size and shape of human skulls, some of them dead white as if they had been picked clean by birds on a battle field and left for
ages in the sun and the rain, some darker, the colour of old ivory; and where a number of them grew together it was as if the buried dead were trying to resurrect themselves by forcing themselves, head first upwards through the earth.

Spiralling slowly up through the tunnels, passing over these long deserted platforms of the
carbonari
, I felt myself to have no past; even the time I had spent at the Pian del Sotto seemed gone beyond recall; and equally, there seemed no future either that I could look forward to with any hope or pleasure. I was on my way to meet a shepherd, a
pastore
called Abramo, who might be brave enough and kind enough to let me stay with him for a day or a week, and he probably would be, but then something would happen, as it had always done, to force me to move on; and eventually it would end, as Luigi said it would, when the snow fell and there were no more leaves in the forests to hide beneath, and they would come and take me away. And a damn good thing it would be for everyone.

Instead of climbing the mountain to the west this morning, I should have been heading south-east towards the line and my own people. It was my duty to do so but something had happened to me during the last weeks, had crept up on me slyly without my realising it. I had become part of a stable way of life which I had no right to do, and in doing so I had lost an essential part of whatever courage and will-power I possessed previously, and of the capacity to make decisions, qualities which were essential if I was to survive. Certainly, I had already experienced some of these sombre feelings, what now seemed so long ago, that afternoon when I had left the house of the Baruffas and taken the track up the valley to Signor Zanoni’s, but even then, in the depths of my despair and loneliness, there had been a small, residual flame of hope kept alive by the knowledge that there was some sort of plan of which I was at least a part.

But now two of the masters of it were in prison and the only one who was still free was engaged in trying to save them and, even if she had not been, now lacked the means to do anything. She was even more hemmed in than I was. I had been a fool and a selfish one to allow them to endanger themselves on my behalf, all the time protesting, hypocritically, against them doing so but always allowing them to go on, until two of them had paid the penalty and the other might very well do so, if she had not done so already. And when I thought of that I remembered what had happened in the hay at the Pian del Sotto, nothing that I had been brought up to think of as ‘really bad’, but bad enough in its context, and no less heartless because it was unthinking, something which, like all the other English, I could say ‘sorry’ for and by doing so consider myself absolved. I was no better than the man who had allowed his diary to be captured with him, who had also chased girls.

But when I came out on the downs, although I could not rid myself of this feeling of guilt which by now stemmed from so many different roots that it could never be eradicated and never be forgotten, my spirits, which could not have been lower, rose a little. The feeling of claustrophobia produced by the forest lifted, and the weariness brought on by the long night vigil fell away. The cloud was thick but there was a hugeness here on the side of the open mountain with only an occasional yew tree looming up before me, that buoyed me up and set me on my way upwards, bearing away slightly to the left so that eventually I would reach the edge of the cliff and not miss the place where the shepherd was. Soon there were no more yews and I was moving in a void with nothing visible in it except the grass immediately beneath my feet. It was as I imagined the first day of the Creation must have been when the earth was without form; but at least there
was light now after darkness and as I drifted rather than walked uphill, as if I was a disembodied spirit, I felt less lost than I had done in that awful wood.

Now I came to the edge of the cliff and for the first time that day heard the clanking of sheep bells just as I had heard them coming from the same direction on that other Sunday. Here, the uniform grey nothingness of the cloud through which I had been climbing was torn apart by a violent wind that was funnelling up the gullies so that the whole face of the cliff and the trees that clung to it here seemed to be smoking, as if it was part of the rim of some immense volcano that was once again becoming active after years of lying dormant, and the forest which had grown up the side of the crater since the last eruption had taken fire and was smouldering until so much of its sap was consumed that it would explode into flame.

At first I could only hear the clanking of the sheep bells; but then after some minutes I began to hear the animals bleating. Sometimes it seemed as if they were very near but then the sound of bells and bleating receded again, and once or twice they ceased completely, as if the entire flock had plunged over the edge of the cliff; and then there was silence except for the noise of the wind which all the time was growing stronger, and I felt that I would never reach the Castello del Prato where the shepherd and his flock were supposed to be. The accession of energy that had come to me when I left the wood had passed away now and I felt weak and light-headed and once I slipped and fell and remained where I was for some time on the wet ground without any will to go on.

But then, suddenly, I was among the flock. They were tall, long-legged, black and dun-coloured creatures, nothing like our own hill sheep and, in my light-headed state, I thought at first
that they were goats. Dogs were barking furiously now, somewhere close by and straight ahead, and then I heard a voice shouting at them to be silent, and unlike Nero they obeyed it.

I had arrived. It was a terribly windy place on the edge of the cliff where a little wood of dwarf beeches grew. Nearby, there was an outcrop of rocks, like a miniature tor, except that they were jagged. They formed a circle with a gently sloping amphitheatre of grass inside it, or what had been grass, but was now all churned up by the sheep, and the gaps between them had been closed with hurdles to form a large, natural pen in which the animals were folded at night. This was what Luigi had called the Castello del Prato. The Castle of the Meadow.

The shepherd was standing in the doorway of his hut which was just inside the wood. The walls were of wattle and the roof was covered with branches and turf. A fire was burning inside it and the smoke was blowing about in the doorway. He was dressed in a long, hooded robe made of black and white sheepskins with the fleece on the outside, which reached almost to his ankles, and the shoulders were so huge that, with it on from the front, he looked as if he was in a sarcophagus that had been stood on end. On his feet he wore home-made sheepskin boots with the fleece on the inside. At his feet were a couple of sheep dogs with their tongues hanging out. They were looking up at him hopefully, waiting for him to give the signal which would set them at my throat. Altogether, they were a wild, outlandish bunch.

He was a big tall man with a mottled, red face and eyes that were all bloodshot, and when I first saw him I thought he must be a heavy drinker. Perhaps he was, but the redness of his face was not due to the bottle but because it had been exposed year after year to the wind – and it was certainly windy here – and his eyes were red and watery, because of the smoke which no chimney, however well-designed, could cope with in such a place.

Then he smiled and his face was transformed under the thick, black eyebrows which had given him a lowering expression, as if he was a bull about to charge. It was like watching the sun rise after a stormy dawn. Then he came towards me and held out a great hand that was so large and hard that I felt as if I was grasping the hand of a statue, rather than that of a human being, except that he was pumping it up and down vigorously in a way that no statue could, saying at the same time, or rather bellowing against the wind in a voice that was used to annihilate distance but sounded as if it was rarely used to address other human beings, which was scarcely surprising, ‘You must be Enrico, the English. You can call me Abramo. I was expecting you, but not so soon. Luigi was up here and told me about you and I’ve been worried. I have to go down in a few days’ time and there was no way of letting you know that I’d be moving. I can’t leave the flock, you see. But, anyway, you’re here, and welcome to my
castello
and my
palazzo.’
He indicated them both with an ironic gesture of the hand.

‘Well, what goes on at the Pian del Sotto?’ he said. ‘Have you run away? I bet old Agata didn’t give you much to eat. I’m married to her sister, you know, but she doesn’t try anything like that with me.’

I told him in a few disjointed sentences, and when I had finished he looked at me closely.

‘You don’t look too good,’ he said.

I was not feeling well at all. Standing here, outside the hut, in the streaming wind, any warmth that I had gained while climbing the mountain had already gone completely. Strong as it was the wind was too damp to dry my clothes which had been wet since the previous night, and although I had a sack over my shoulders it was no protection now that it too was soaked through. I was shivering violently and my stomach felt as if it was filled with ice.
‘Inside,’ he said. And bundled me through the door.

The interior of the hut, which he called his
baracca
, was warm and snug but the transition from the outside, which smelled far less of sheep than the interior, was too much for me. I felt everything going round, and the next thing I remember was sitting on the edge of a rough bed with my head down between my knees and being given a battered old mug half full of some colourless liquid.

‘Drink,’ he said, and I drank.

It was as strong as the
grappa
Luigi had given me the previous night – nothing I could imagine, not even army rum, could be much stronger than that had been – but it had a different taste, something I seemed to remember having once drunk but couldn’t put a name to in my present state. The strength of it, and the taste, made me throw my head back, shuddering.

‘Drink it all,’ he said. ‘It’ll do you good. It’s good stuff
(Roba buona, fatto con grano e ginepro
, was how he described it): I make it myself with the apparatus down there,’ and he pointed in the direction of the edge of the cliff.

I drank it. Grain and juniper berries was what he had said. Of course, that was what it was, gin, the sort the Dutch drank; but much stronger than the Hollands in an earthenware bottle which my father kept for years at home and which nobody ever touched. I had only tried it once and disliked it. It was good now.

Then I began to feel bad again. I remember Abramo helping me to take off my wet clothes and putting me into an immensely thick shirt, then lying down on the bed which was covered with sheepskins and having more piled on top of me, and then nothing much more at all for what seemed a long time.

I must have had a temperature because I remember being wet through and Abramo changing my shirt for another of the same sort, and this happened several times and I remember asking for
cold water, because I had an insatiable thirst, but he would only give me warm water, although I begged him for cold.

‘Bad for your stomach, cold water,’ he said.

Sometimes he brought me a disagreeable, bitter infusion made with some sort of moss which he told me he gathered on the mountainside and which, like all such infusions, do the patient good because they are bitter and disagreeable. Abramo was like an alchemist. Later, when I was better, he told me he used to bathe his eyes with something he called
erba per gli occhi
, the plant for the eyes, one which had blue flowers and which, long, long afterwards I found out was something call
Euphrasia.
Abramo was one of the gentlest men I have ever met, in spite of his stony hands, and being nursed by him I felt as if I was one of his lambs. The only other thing I can remember about this time was the howling of the wind, which seemed to go on and on, and the smoke.

On the morning of the third day I woke not only better, but cured, although I felt a bit weak; and, for the first time I was able to take notice of my surroundings. It was very early but Abramo was already out, perhaps he stayed out all night guarding his sheep, I had no way of knowing, and I could see through the open door that it was a beautiful, still morning.

The
baracca
was not more than ten feet square and the two beds, one of which I was occupying, were made with the trunks of young trees and the mattresses were boughs with the leaves still on them, dead and browned by the heat of the fire. On top of them were sheepskins sewn together, some to sleep on, others to be used as covers, all of which gave off a powerful odour of sheep, which was scarcely surprising. In one corner of the hut there was a raised fireplace with a pot-hook over it from which a large copper vessel hung down over some red-hot embers. Its contents were simmering gently and from it there came a delicious smell. Above the fire there was a rudimentary chimney, made of
flat stones with the joints between them filled with earth. The door was made of the same material as the walls, closely woven wattle.