A Bell for Adano (16 page)

“Bully,” said His Lordship. “What else?”

Well, to show how the town was financing itself, there was the muslin. A Liberty Ship had come into Adano harbor, and had discharged a cargo of war materials - bulldozers, bridge girders, tents, and some ammunition. Down in the bottom of one hold the unloaders found six bales of white muslin. The skipper of the ship said he had to unload it. The Quartermaster on the beach would not take it. There were no papers for the muslin, no consignment. The muslin had U.S. Treasury markings on it, so it was obviously Lend-Lease, and it was obviously lost. Major Joppolo heard about it, and seeing the rags on the people of his town, he said he could use it. He called his Civil Supply director and told him about the muslin, and the director gave permission to sell it at a fair price. Major Joppolo put two rolls up for sale, and held the other four in reserve. There was such a shortage of cloth in the town that the two rolls were gone in that many hours.

“Good work, Joppolo,” His Lordship said. “What else?”

There was the refugee problem. On the day of the invasion, there were only six or seven thousand people in the town; the others had all run to the hills. Within a few days there were thirty-two or -three thousand. The town got badly crowded, and one reason was that there were a lot of refugees from the town of Vicinamare. These people had come down to Adano because the Allies had been bombing Vicinamare pretty hard before the invasion. Now that the battle had gone beyond Vicinamare, they wanted to go home, but there was no transportation. One day the Major saw a German bus driving down the street. An American soldier was driving it. Major Joppolo said to himself: “I could use that bus.” He asked around and found out it belonged to the Engineers. So he called the Motor Officer and said: “I’d like to use that bus of yours one day a week.” The Motor Officer said it would be okay with him if the Major had proper permission. So Major Joppolo called the Adano base commander, who said it would be all right. And a few days later one busload of cheering, laughing people had started home. Now Colonel Sartorius, head of Amgot for the Province of Vicinamare, heard about the bus a few days later, and he got sore, and told Major Joppolo not to do that any more. “Sometimes,” Major Joppolo said, “I think Colonel Sartorius is an awful dope.”

Lord Runcin said: “Do you mean you think he takes harmful drugs?” And his Lordship dipped into his snuffbox.

Major Joppolo said: “Oh no, Lord, I just mean he’s stupid.”

“Dope, eh?” His Lordship said, and put the expression down in his book. “Very good, what else?”

Well, Lord, the people of Adano were so contented under the Americans that they offered of their own accord, without anybody suggesting it, to maintain the little American cemetery on the outskirts of town. So they built a fence around it and painted it white, and Russo the old stonecutter was making headstones, and every Sunday the people took flowers up and put them on the graves of the boys who had died taking the town.

“I say,” His Lordship said, “damned touching. What else?”

Food was pretty good. In the first days, the Major had found five cars of wheat on a siding at the railroad station, had had it ground into flour, and had been able to spare some for the neighboring hill towns, which were starving. He had given one baker a very heavy fine, three thousand lira, for baking soggy bread, for refusing to sell it on credit, for refusing to take American invasion lira, and for having dirty hands; and since then the bread had been pretty good from all the bakers. He had taken steps to send the fishermen out. He had arranged for the people to have pasta, which they had not had for eight months. Food was all right.

“Good,” said Lord Runcin. Every time His Lordship took snuff, Major Joppolo’s eyes nearly popped out of his head and he almost forgot what he was talking about. “Anything else?”

Well, cleaning this town up was something like Hercules and that stable of his. But fortunately the Major had some experience with sanitation. When the Americans came into the town, one old man was charged with keeping it clean. All he had the strength to do was sweep off the sidewalk in front of the Palazzo and carry away Mayor Nasta’s s garbage. Now Major Joppolo had a crew of forty-five men working. They had eight refuse carts and an Italian truck which had been converted into a water truck. It sprayed the streets every morning.

“Water,” said His Lordship. “Positively pansy.” The Major didn’t understand that expression, but he took it as a compliment.

“Oh sure, Lord,” he said, “this town is much better off than it was before we came in. You can’t imagine how these people were ground down. Why, they’re so used to being afraid of officials, and so used to making out forms and being hauled up to court and having carabinieri ask them their names, that they all put their last names first and their first names last, the way it goes on official papers, all the time. Just like the Chinese.

“Lots of them have told me that they’re better off now than they were before. For one thing, they can congregate in the streets any time they want and talk about whatever they want to. They can listen to their radios. They know they can get a fair trial out of me. They can come to the City Hall and talk to me any time they want. Mayor Nasta had office hours from twelve to one each day and you had to apply for an audience weeks in advance. I told you about the streets being clean. Oh, there are lots of ways, Lord, and if I have anything to do with it there’ll be lots more.”

His Lordship was getting a wee bit bored. He dipped more and more frequently into his snuffbox and looked out the window. “Fine show, fine show,” he said. “Anything bad in this town?”

“Yes, there is, Lord,” the Major said. “One thing.”

“I wish all of our towns had just one thing wrong, Joppolo.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly bad, Lord, and maybe it’ll sound a little silly to you.”

“My job,” said Lord Runcin, taking snuff grandly, “is to make sense out of silly things. What is it, Joppolo?” “Well sir, this town needs a bell.”

“A bell? Why, Major, I heard such a jangling of bells at eight o’clock this morning, you might have thought it was Christmas day.”

“Yes, but this is a special bell, Lord.”

“I didn’t know they had any special bells except in Hell.”

“This one was seven hundred years old. It was just about the most important thing in the town, to hear these people talk. Mussolini took it away...” And Major Joppolo told how the bell had been crated up and shipped away to make gun barrels, and how the people had come to him about it, and how he had tried to track it, and had found that it was almost certainly melted down, and at any rate was in unoccupied territory.

Lord Runcin’s colonial attitude cropped up. “Surely,” he said, “these people can get along with the bells they have. We can’t afford to be too sentimental, you know, Joppolo. Can’t afford to let these people be too happy, you know. Can’t afford to let discipline get too loose.”

“Lord, I can’t see that happiness and discipline don’t go together.”

“Young man,” said His Lordship, taking a sniff for emphasis, “I think I’ve had a little more experience in these things than you have.”

“Every time I’ve done something for these people,” ‘ Major Joppolo said, “I’ve found they did two things for me just out of thanks.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about this bell?” “I just wondered, Lord, if you could suggest a way to get them another bell. Not just any bell, you know, but one that could take the place of the one they lost.” “Every time I need something out of the ordinary,” His Lordship said, “I make application to the United States Army. They have the most extraordinary things, you know. They gave me a jeep. They gave me my choice of pipes, damned good briar, too, went from Scotland to the U.S.A. and all the way back here to Algiers, by way of the U.S. Army. Some one told me about these electrical razors, and they even got me one of those, but I can’t use it because of this damned Italian current, wrong current, you know, not like our current. I suggest you try the U.S. Army, Joppolo.”

“I haven’t had quite the same kind of luck with the Army, Lord. You got some friend, or something? Who do you ask for all these fancy things they get you?”

“Just write General Wilson, W. B. Wilson, Quartermaster Depot, Algiers. General Wilson told me he’d try to get me anything I wanted. just use my name, Joppolo, he’ll find you a bell. I’m sure of it:’

Major Joppolo wrote down General Wilson’s name and address. “Thank you, Lord,” the Major said. “That sounds like it might work. I sure want to get a bell for this town.”

Lord Runcin clapped his snuffbox shut and stood up. “Well, Joppolo, sounds to me as if you were doing a wizard job here. Keep it up. If you have any troubles, just give me a buzz.” And His Lordship left, on the verge of a delicious sneeze which he had been saving in his nostrils for ten minutes.

Major Joppolo stared out of the window, and he was wonderfully happy, with the double happiness of accomplishment and praise for it. He was drawn back from his pleasant daze by a torrent of Italian.

It came from Quattrocchi.

“You Americans think you are so civilized, you think you are doing us a favor by disembarking on our shores. You are no better than the Germans. The Germans never did anything in this town such as your men have done. I gave you my house. I did not mind giving you my house. I thought the Americans were civilized. You are the one who told me they are civilized. You said they would take care of my house as if they owned it. You are a liar.”

Having been praised so recently, Major Joppolo was stung by this dispraise.

“What do you want?” he said sharply. “Stop this babbling and tell me what you want.”

“I don’t want anything. What I have lost I can never get back, so how can I want anything?”

“If you don’t want anything, why are you taking up my time?”

Quattroccbi spoke sarcastically: “I’m sorry if your time is so valuable, Your Worship.” And then he spoke angrily: “I have lost some things which were valuable to me, too. I went to my house this morning, to get some things I had left behind. And what did I find? I found that your barbarians had smashed my terra cotta head, it was done by the Florentine Camilliani in the sixteenth century. What value can you place on that? They tore my Venus; it was by Giorgione. What is the price of that? They smashed the glasses in which my mother drank her bridal toasts in Venice. How many lira do you think they were worth to me?”

Quattrocchi began to cry, and became incoherent. Major Joppolo was furious. He called up Captain Purvis and said: “Purvis, what the hell’s the matter with your men? Did you know they’d been behaving like a bunch of wild men in their billet? This fellow was good enough to let them use his house and some of the stuff in it, why the hell did they have to abuse it? I want you to find out who busted up the stuff down at your billet and have them in your office in fifteen minutes.” And he hung up without waiting for the astonished Captain to take a deep breath.

Major Joppolo walked around to the other side of his desk and patted the sobbing Quattrocchi on the shoulder. He said: “Come, Quattrocchi, let’s go down to your house and see exactly what they did.”

So the two men walked down the street to the beautiful house. Quattrocchi led the Major through the rooms on the second floor and showed him the broken things. Major Joppolo was terribly depressed by what he saw. “There is no excuse for it,” he said softly to Quattrocchi, who was beyond fury.

Major Joppolo took Quattrocchi up to the M.P. headquarters. Captain Purvis had Chuck, Bill and Polack there. As soon as the Major came in, the three boys stood at attention.

“At ease,” Major Joppolo said, “but listen.” The three boys stood at ease.

“You fellows ought to be sent home to the States,” he said. “What kind of an example do you think you men are for the people here? How do you think well ever persuade them that we’re decent people if you behave like we all live in the woods and have shaggy fur?”

Polack said: “We didn’t mean no hurt, Major.”

The Major said: “Your intentions don’t make the slightest bit of difference. It’s the result that matters.” Polack said: “We was doin’ it for you, Major.” “What do you mean, doing it for me? How could you think I would want you to do anything like that?” Polack said: “We was lookin’ for a present for you, sir.” Polack thought that if the Major stacked up to all the boasting Chuck Schultz had done about him the night before, he ought to be able to talk their way out of this fix.

The Major said: “Why in God’s name would you want to get me a present? I’ve never seen you before.” Polack said: “We’re just enlisted men. We seen you before.”

Major Joppolo said: “I still want to know how you thought you were getting me a present, and why you were.”

Polack said: “It was goin’ to be a gom’-away present.”

The Major said: “Who’s going away?”

Polack said: “Well, Corporal Schultz here said-”

Chuck Schultz said: “You let me handle this, Polack.”

Major Joppolo turned on Corporal Schultz: “Say, what is this all about anyway?”

Chuck Schultz saw that there was no way out. He said: “There wasn’t no excuse for what we done, Major. We was very drunk. I think Polack here’s still a little drunk.”

Polack raised a threatening fist and said: “Why you..:’

Major Joppolo said: “What’s all this about a present?” Chuck said: “Sir, we just got some kind of a drunk idea that you was about the best officer we ever seen, and we figured we wanted to give you a present. We thought maybe we could find a present for you in the house. We knew you was Italian, more or less, and we thought you’d like something Italian from the house. That’s all there was to it.”

Major Joppolo said, and his voice was much softer: “I’m not Italian, boys. I’m American, and sometimes I’m not as proud of it as I’d like to be.”

Then the Major turned to Quattrocchi, and he said in Italian: “I hardly know what to tell you. I know that no apologies and no payment can ever return what you have lost. I wish to tell you that these men who committed the crime are sorry for what they did, now that they realize how cruel they were to you. I wish to tell you, Quattrocchi, that I feel less proud of being an American than I did yesterday. These men will be punished justly and severely for what they have done. I want you to file a claim for payment for what was destroyed, and I wouldn’t blame you for doubling the prices. That’s all I can say, Quattrocchi.”