A Winter's Night (44 page)

Sugano went off with about two hundred men and Wolf went back with the others. Wolf's new army were all from the Reno river valley, from places like Marzabotto, Grizzana, Vergato, Monzuno and Pian di Venola. They went back with him because they knew what was going to happen and, if they had to die, they preferred to do so fighting in front of the doors of their own homes.

There were no embraces, no tears. When they reached the ridge, Sugano turned around to watch Wolf's column as they were making their way back to Monte Sole and, from deep inside, he wished them luck, because he thought they were going towards sure death.

Although Fabrizio was a newcomer to the brigade, living through such a harrowing experience had made him as tough and seasoned as any veteran. He would exchange a few words with Montesi now and then, seeking comfort for the remorse he felt at leaving Wolf and his comrades as they headed for their destiny.

“It's not your fault, Fabrizio,” Montesi replied. “Each one of us, in his own heart, made the decision he thought best. No one can know what fate has in store for us.”

The next day, Sugano's brigade entered Montefiorino and reported to Mario Ricci, known as “Armando,” the commander of the Modena division. He immediately assigned them to Frassinoro, not far from the border with Tuscany. Just a few days later, they received a telephone call from headquarters alerting them to the fact that two German motorized divisions had launched a massive attack against Montefiorino, at the northern edge of the territory, on the valley side. The partisans were seeking to resist in every way possible, but they were greatly outnumbered in terms of vehicles, men and arms. Sugano's group was ordered to move west of Frassinoro towards Val d'Asta on the border with Reggio, because the Germans were attempting to outflank them there in order to deny them a line of escape towards Tuscany and the Allied lines. The brigade took up position in a village on the ridge which offered a vantage point over a vast territory, allowing them to spot troop movement at a distance. At four o'clock in the morning, a courier brought the order to move further southwest, in the direction of the Forbici pass. It was a difficult, risky transfer because the Germans had already infiltrated the entire area and had destroyed several villages.

At about ten o'clock in the morning, Spino told Sugano that he had good news: “There's a shepherd who has just come through the Forbici pass; I interrogated him and he says that the route is clear.”

Sugano demanded to talk with the man himself. “Well?” he asked him. “What did you see up there?”

“There's a group of your men guarding the pass. I'm sure it was them because I heard them talking.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“As sure as I'm here talking to you now. They were men from the Modena division.”

“All right, let's go see. Eyes open and fingers on your triggers.”

The brigade fanned out and started the ascent. Fabrizio very soon lost contact with Bruno Montesi, who was with another couple of guys from town: Aldo Banti and Amedeo Bisi. Fabrizio felt like calling out, asking them to wait up, but he couldn't even see where they were. The unit was moving across open ground because most of the trees had been cut down, but the men had managed to camouflage themselves using the branches and vegetation from juniper bushes and oak saplings.

The silence was unreal; not even the birds were singing. Sugano was ahead of the others; every few steps, he would check that the way was clear and signal for them to proceed towards the peak. All at once, the still air was torn by the deafening din of machine guns and artillery. Sugano shouted out: “Take shelter! The Germans! Shoot that fucking shepherd, dammit! Kill him, I want him dead!” He was furious, but his men had more to think about than shooting the shepherd. Some had been hit, others were trying to find some kind of cover from the thousands of rounds that were hailing down from every direction.

Fabrizio dove into a drainage ditch, totally bewildered. In the distance, to his left, he thought he saw Montesi with Banti, Amedeo Bisi and three or four others, crawling, their bodies flattened to the ground as bullets hit the stones and rocks all around them, sending up sprays of sparks and scorching splinters. Fabrizio waited for the firing to cease and then took off at a run, bent over double, in the direction of his comrades, but the bursts started up again instantly. He felt a sudden piercing pain in his left leg as it folded under him and he crumbled to the ground.

He shouted and called out but no one heard him. He started to drag himself back to the only point of safety he knew, the ditch. Once he had rolled over the lip and into the narrow trench, he elbowed himself forward, leaving a trail of blood behind him. At least he knew that he was following the slope of the hillside in a downward direction. After a while, there was a rise in the terrain flanking the ditch that he thought would afford him some protection. He pulled himself out and crawled with great difficulty over to a big beech tree and there he stopped, propped up in a sitting position against the trunk. One of the brigade members ran by, and then another, but neither of them stopped or even listened to his pleas for help. He realized that he was bleeding to death and he closed his eyes and prepared to die. So many had died, after all, young guys like him, on one side and the other, what was so special about his fate? His had been a brief adventure; he'd done nothing worthwhile, given no real contribution to the cause. He was dying for nothing. The one thing he had done burned inside of him like a red-hot iron. The shoes . . . the shoes were still almost new. Maybe someone else would get some good out of them. Your shoes are as important as your gun, when you have to fight and to run, run, run . . .

The world had stopped and he thought his hour had come, but there was a hand on his shoulder and it was shaking him as if to wake him up. He opened his eyes: “Bruno!”

The Blacksmith was there, standing in front of him. He heaved Fabrizio onto his back and carried him to a wood of oak saplings and there they waited. Bisi and Banti showed up along with other comrades, including those who had heard him call out but hadn't stopped. “They were the ones who told me you were wounded,” said Montesi. They worked together to fashion a stretcher out of ash branches, cutting them with their bayonets.

“Where's Sugano?” Fabrizio managed to say.

“I don't know. We lost him. Now we have to try to save ourselves.”

They began to make their way towards the nearest town, steering clear of the German soldiers who were still patrolling. They often met up with isolated groups of partisans who were still armed and organized. There was nothing to eat and Montesi himself was bleeding from a wound in his neck caused by shrapnel. They stayed awake the whole night. There was no food, but plenty of cold, clear water, that flowed in a thousand rivulets from the mountain peaks. Fabrizio became delirious. The next day they reached a tiny village, where two doctors had set up a sort of field hospital for the wounded partisans. They were out of everything they needed, from sterile surgical instruments to medicines.

They had to amputate, without anesthesia, using a butcher's saw and a pair of pruning shears. Fabrizio's screams of pain could be heard at a great distance.

Montesi wept.

Those who could, sought shelter in Tuscany behind the Allied lines. Sugano and a small group of his most loyal soldiers returned to Bologna.

 

Wolf and his men reached Monte Sole and engaged the Germans in a battle to the last drop of blood with their tommy guns and pistols against the Nazi tanks, heavy machine guns and cannons. In the end, the only surviving member of the group was Wolf, pitted against a German officer. They faced each other in an old-fashioned duel, one on one, until the Italian defender ran out of ammunition.

Wounded in the shoulder, he managed nonetheless to get away and run for the woods, stemming the bleeding as best he could. Then just like a wounded wolf, he found a hidden den, tucked away in a mountain ravine, and went there to die.

His stiff, cramped body wasn't found until a year later, after the war had ended.

In the end the Germans managed to destroy the defenses of the Republic of Montefiorino, but partisan groups continued to act independently in various areas of the mountains, trying to coordinate as best they could as they waited for the Allies to launch the final offensive. Bruno Montesi took refuge with his men on the other side of the Allied lines. Fabrizio was spirited back to town using the country lanes and back roads of the region. His parents welcomed him home with all the warmth and affection they were capable of, trying as best they could to hide their dismay at the terrible toll that the war had taken on the once-perfect body of their beloved son. They did everything in their power to distract him and to help him to find ways to face this new life in which he'd never be equal to the others. But he was always sad and melancholy, and they'd often find him sitting under the big oak at the end of the courtyard with a lost expression.

Rossano seemed to have vanished into thin air. His parents' frantic efforts to locate him turned up nothing; no one had any idea of what might have happened to the boy or where he might be. Fabrizio heard he had gone missing, and in his nightmares the boy with the black shirt whose shoes he had taken became Rossano. One day when his parents were in the fields and he was home alone, he took the shoes from the closet where he'd hidden them and burned them.

Sugano managed to reach Bologna with the few comrades who had decided to stay with him, including Spino. Disobeying his commander's orders to lay low, Spino snuck out of the safe house one night to visit his mother and let her know he was all right. He was recognized and surrounded by a group from the Black Brigades. He put up a fierce fight with his pistol, but he didn't have time to assemble the pieces of the Sten he kept in his rucksack and he was captured. He was tortured to death; for one day and one night, his enemies inflicted unimaginable abuse on him. Then they publicly exposed his scourged, lifeless body as a warning to anyone who followed his example.

Like Sugano, many other partisans had gathered in the cities, imagining that the Allied offensive was imminent, but General Alexander halted the Allied advance in November, postponing the campaign until the following spring. The outcome was that the fascists who had run off came back to trap the partisans.

Perhaps that was the blackest hour of the whole millenary history of Italy. Never had her sons been pitted so ferociously against one another.

There was no limit to the violence.

The slaughter lasted all winter and spring, when the bombing started up again on a wide scale. Alexander's armies finally succeeded in breaking through the Gothic line and occupying the vast plain, the Po river valley. The Allies entered Bologna on the morning of April 21, 1945: there were Poles, British and Americans, but also Italian soldiers from the Friuli, Legnano and Folgore brigades and a great number of partisans.

Many of the locals were finally free to return to town: Bruno Montesi, Aldo Banti, Amedeo Bisi and others. Long beards, submachine guns slung around their necks, grenades in their belts: well-brought-up people regarded them with suspicion, or with a mix of fear and scorn.

Montesi went to visit Fabrizio as soon as he could.

“How are you?”

“You can see for yourself how I am.”

“Fabrizio, what you have to consider is that you're alive. You can be with your parents, your friends, you can read and study, meet people, travel. You can see your country finally liberated and embarking on a new road, building a new future. For the dead, it's all over with.”

“They're better off than me.”

“That's not true. You'll get used to it. Little by little, things will change.”

“Forgive me, Bruno, you did everything you could to save my life and I'm acting like a mean, ungrateful bastard.”

“You would have done the same thing for me. And maybe, in your place, I would have said the same things. We still need you. I've got big plans and you can help me, right here. Work on regaining your strength, in your body but most of all, in your mind. I know you can. I'll come back to visit again soon.”

When Montesi came to visit Fabrizio again, it was to lay out his projects and plans; he had founded a section of the NLC right there in town, along with Banti and Bisi. But the transition proved to be anything but smooth. In the months that followed, you could cut the tension with a knife: people figured that the day of reckoning wouldn't be far off, and they were right. A number of prominent people were justly or unjustly accused of collaborationism, of spying for the Social Republic or the fascists, and were simply dragged out of their houses in the middle of the night and put to death. For some it was a question of justice, for others ruthless revenge. In a nearly complete vacuum of rules and laws, anyone could decide, from one day to the next, to get rid of a personal enemy, to seek revenge for some perceived snub, to have the satisfaction of punishing someone who had wronged him in some way.

One day the news spread in town that Tito Ferretti, one of the most important landowners in the area, had been killed near the Samoggia as he was travelling by carriage to the stock exchange in Bologna to check on the price of pork. He had neither sons nor daughters because he was unmarried, and for this reason his workers and tenant farmers respectfully called him “
il
signorino,
” the term reserved for a gentleman bachelor. His mother, an elderly noblewoman, had gone to live in the city because, she said, she didn't feel safe any longer, given the mood in town. She had often asked her son to join her, but he refused because he was much too fond of the farm, of the land and all the animals, to want to give it all up.

“And really,” he would tell her, “who could have it in for me? I've given money to everyone: to the fascists, to the partisans . . . ” He was throwing ears of corn to the pigs as he spoke with her.