Between Enemies (17 page)

Buttoning himself up, Renato lowered his head slightly so as not to knock it against the beams. Loretta could not find the strength to get to her feet, or to look at the man who had taken her in such a way. She kept spitting, wiping her eyes with her fingers. With trembling hands she felt for the knickers rolled down round her ankles. With a handful of hay she wiped at the blood already drying at the backs of her knees.

Renato went down the ladder first, disappearing into his quarters. From my perch I saw Loretta walking slowly, weeping and hobbling in the rain. I saw her heading for the latrine. She couldn’t go back indoors at once, because her mother would have guessed all.

Nineteen

G
RANDPA AND
I
WERE WATCHING
G
RANDMA COUNT UP THE
gold sovereigns. They were her little nest egg, craftily wrested from the fury of the plunderers. Grandma had sent for Renato. When he entered the room Grandpa turned his face to the wall and stared at the whitewash. Grandma handed two gold sovereigns to Renato, who was limping more heavily than usual. ‘You know how best to use them…We’ve run out of flour…and get a few pieces of dried meat too.’

Renato glanced down at the coins. ‘It’s not enough, madam. The prices are going up along with the risks. This quartermaster in Sernaglia…If they find him out they’ll shoot him.’

Grandma avoided his eye. ‘Take care not to get yourself killed, Signor Manca,’ she said quietly.

Renato looked at me. He didn’t know I had seen what had gone on in the hayloft. He gave me a long look, with hard, cold eyes.

‘Where I come from, madam, we slaughter the boar, not the pig, and falcons for us are chickens. If there’s something to be done we do it, or something to be said we say it.’ He tossed the two sovereigns in the palm of his hand until a third one stopped him.

‘That’s settled, then,’ she said.

‘I’ll be back at midday tomorrow.’ Renato took another look at the coins. ‘This is Queen Victoria,’ he murmured.

‘Old savings…but gold doesn’t age.’ Grandma dismissed the steward with a brusque gesture, which she then softened with a smile. But he had already left the room.

Grandpa protested: ‘I could have gone myself.’

‘Real life is
my
province.’

Grandpa went out, slamming the door. I followed him.

The rain had turned to snow, getting heavier and heavier. I took Giulia to the hayloft. There were only a few soldiers about the place, and those few preferred to stay in the warm, along with the mules, drinking the wine they had filched from the peasants. We climbed the ladder, and I stretched out on the hay and kissed her. I wanted to make a show of strength and determination, to take her at once, but she shoved me roughly away and looked at me as one does a stranger. ‘There’s someone crying… Can’t you hear?’

I hadn’t heard a thing.

Giulia stood up. She no longer had that ridiculous gasmask hanging on her belt.

But now I heard it too, a stifled wail. I got to my feet. I had hay all over me, even in my shirt collar, and it was itchy.

A sob. We both scrambled up the pile of hay on all fours. At the far end of the hayloft was a dark space littered with barrels and casks. The Hohenzollern thugs had stripped all the meat off the beast and left only the bones for those of the Hapsburgs. There was an acrid, sickening stench.

The cry was like that of a trapped cat. Giulia asked me for a match. I handed her the box. ‘Watch it! The hay!’ The match showed us the jumble of bits and pieces. A second match solved the mystery: Loretta.

She had hidden under a table, between two broken barrels.
Her face was wedged between her knees. A glimpse of her calf beneath her skirt showed a long, black graze. The frock beneath her open overcoat wasn’t dirty and wasn’t torn, but no doubt about it, it betrayed her roll in the hay.

‘Was it the soldiers?’ Giulia’s face was on fire. The match went out.

‘It wasn’t anything,’ said Loretta from the darkness.

Giulia thrust the matchbox into my hand. Her lips touched my ear. ‘Hop it,’ she whispered. ‘There are things that can’t be said in front of a man.’

I re-crossed the barrier of hay. Once down the ladder I turned up my coat collar and began to run through the thickening snow.

In the kitchen was Teresa, stirring polenta.

‘Have you seen my daughter anywhere?’

I shook my head. But Teresa gave me a piercing look and wielded a dishcloth and ladle like a sword and buckler. ‘It’s that female…been spinning cobwebs in your brain, she has…and she’s too old for you anyway.’

I stammered out an objection that Giulia was only twenty-five.

‘For you she’s too old, lad, that’s all I can say.’

I left the room. I found it hard to stand up to censure from Teresa. With Grandma and Aunt Maria I could manage it, but there was something in Teresa which awed me. In my eyes she was the guardian of the truth, and against the truth there’s not much to be done. It was lucky she hadn’t pressed me about Loretta, because I wasn’t a good liar.

That evening, as happened more and more, Grandma stayed in her bedroom and Grandpa, who without his wife nearby became himself four times over, set about entertaining us.

We ate in the big dining room, beneath Great-Grandma’s portrait, because the Austrian officers had all gone off to Pieve
di Soligo for a reception in honour of someone or other. Teresa was serving at table. Point-blank, Donna Maria asked her where her daughter was, and she said Loretta wasn’t feeling well and had retired to bed. ‘She has a sore backside, but tomorrow she’ll be on her feet.’ Adding in an undertone, ‘If not I’ll give her what for.’ Grandpa said that there was a strange fever going around. He’d heard as much that afternoon in the
bottiglieria
where he’d been to listen into the world ‘with wine before and farts behind’, and that in the hospital at Conegliano there were not only wounded soldiers but also patients with ‘they don’t quite know what, but rumours say it’s typhus.’

‘You like to scare us, don’t you?’ said my aunt.

‘A little pep in the air clears the brainpan.’

The cook, holding a dish of rissoles made of goodness knows what, failed to suppress a
diambarne de l’ostia
, and Donna Maria rebuked her with one of her looks.

Great-Grandma’s portrait, hung between the two windows, was gazing down at us. She had been a most beautiful girl, with great sapphire-coloured eyes beneath a broad brow, and when Grandpa noticed me staring at the picture he commented, ‘She had the bearing of a Baltic princess.’

‘Why Baltic?’ we all asked with one voice, but he didn’t answer.

After supper we gathered round the fire. Teresa brought us a hot lemon drink. For a while Grandpa didn’t even touch his cup, but then he furtively added a drop of ‘something strong’, because ‘what you need you need’. He detested that pale yellow brew, but it would have distressed him not to sip along with the company. Aunt Maria asked him about his book. He said it was coming along, that he was trying to get the plot straight, but he had not yet managed to get his central character properly in focus.

‘But in that case you haven’t even started, have you?’

‘I know lots about the lesser characters…But you see, Maria, it is as it is in the army. It’s the sergeants and the corporals who do all the work. The privates and the officers provide numerical strength and showpieces, but the real work is put in by the ones in the middle. Give me a good sergeant and I’ll set you up a good contingent.’ He lit a cigar. ‘Do you want to know what my story is about? It’s about the world that’s going all to blazes.’ And for a moment he vanished in his cloud of smoke.

Teresa in the meanwhile was starting on her round of the room. There were very many candles to be snuffed out.

Twenty

T
HE SKY WAS MURKY, AN ENCRUSTED STEWPOT
. D
RAWN UP
in double file in front of the church was the Hungarian contingent in full strength. It filled nearly the whole of the unpaved road down as far as the Villa gates. We were there too, all of us, not in answer to an invitation but because Grandma and Aunt Maria said we were duty bound to do so. There were no rowdy children, no barking dogs. The alleyways were hushed. Half a dozen pious old biddies, swathed in vast black shawls, were telling their beads at the foot of the church steps. Don Lorenzo had been locked up in the sacristy with half a keg of cordial, guarded by two sentries.

Von Feilitzsch was wearing, hanging from a raspberry-coloured sash, a purple cross with the monogram of the late emperor – F J – glittering on a gold chain, supported by the beaks of the two-headed eagle. Their claws gripped a scroll bearing the words ‘Viribus unitis’. They too like to call themselves heirs of Rome, I thought.

The bell weighed a hundred kilos, and it was lowered with all the necessary caution. The ropes were handled by twelve infantrymen. It hit the ground with a dull thud. A short silence ensued. The major crossed himself, and the sign of the cross swept along the line of troops like a flutter of wings. We too crossed ourselves. Aunt Maria’s eyes, as she stood erect beneath
the arch of the church door, flashed with anger.

The ceremony was over in a few minutes. The noise of the breaking of ranks merged with that of the approaching cart, drawn by two oxen with sawn-off horns. The bell was destined for some depot or other, thereafter to be melted down, or simply forgotten. Its voice would become a memory only.

‘With the same sacred symbols, the same God,’ said Grandma, walking arm-in-arm with Grandpa Gugliemo, ‘we ought not to be making war on each other.’

‘They lowered their eyes, did you notice? They were ashamed of what they were doing.’ Aunt Maria was deeply outraged, more so even than for the sake of the raped girls. ‘Field Marshal Boroevic, may you die alone with your nightmares, before the fires of hell strip the flesh from your bones!’ I had never before heard her curse anyone. She usually preferred irony to invective.

Grandpa put his free hand on my shoulder and said in a low voice, ‘Did you hear that? Now your aunt has started competing with Don Lorenzo.’

Grandma took her hand off his arm. ‘Pipe down, you good-for-nothing.’ And she took Aunt Maria’s hand as she entered the gateway. The sentry – there were no longer two of them – sprang to attention, but a moment later, when Grandpa and I passed him, he pointedly relaxed into a slovenly stand-at-ease.

We all lunched together in one of the upstairs rooms. No mention was made of the bell. We ate boiled greens and hot broth that tasted of soil. Grandma didn’t touch a thing. Loretta, steady on her feet but surly in the face, brought us a slice of apple tart filched by Teresa’s swift hands from the gluttony of the officers eating in the big dining room on the floor below. ‘All we now get is the scraps,’ said my aunt, as she cut the slice into four. I glanced at Loretta. Her hands were a little unsteady,
but on her lips was a smirk, and she was certainly thinking, Your leftovers is all I ever get.

While I was savouring the last precious mouthful of tart, Grandma said, ‘Giulia’s elder sister died last week. Don Lorenzo told me.’

Why had Giulia told me nothing about it?

‘A merciful release,’ said my aunt, placing her knife and fork correctly together on her plate. ‘That poor girl, reduced to skin and bone. I saw her last year…yes, it was fifteen months ago, in their house at San Polo.’

‘And her mother…a saint,’ put in Grandma.

I looked at Grandpa. He was drumming his fingers on the handles of the cutlery and moving his lips imperceptibly as if reading. His thoughts were elsewhere. He lit a cigar and asked for an ashtray, which Loretta promptly brought him.

‘It has been a terrible business,’ continued my aunt. ‘She was reduced to an absolute skeleton; only the face was left of the woman she was. I couldn’t even look at her. Just too, too distressing.’ She shook her head and turned a hard look on me. She realized that I was not in the least upset at the fate of her friend. Then she said sharply, ‘You must watch your step with that Giulia.’

‘You should know, Paolo, that when your Giulia attained the age of eighteen…’ I knew at once from her tone of voice that my aunt was about to deliver me a lecture she’d had up her sleeve for quite a while. ‘It must have been early August of…1911 because…well, it doesn’t matter…That day, during the birthday party…’

But I already knew all about it. How could I not have known? In a city like Venice, the event was front page news. And for some things antennae sprout early in children. Giulia had had
a lover, a friend of her father’s. An old man whom everyone called ‘a fine figure of a man’, though what I remembered of him were his crooked teeth. That evening her lover had put his chrome-plated revolver barrel into his mouth. He’d done it in front of everyone, in front of the birthday cake a span high with all the candles lit ‘while awaiting the puff of the lovely eighteen-year-old with the flame-coloured hair’, as the
Gazettino
put it. A masterful coup de théâtre, with the brains spurting out and the removal of shreds of pulpy matter from the chandelier, that occupied half a paragraph in the leading article. The grown-ups – one thinks this way at the age of nine – were divided into two parties: ‘She’s a good lass who’s had bad luck’, and ‘It was she who made his brains burst out of his ears’. But in such disputes, we all know, the dead have a certain advantage. ‘Tombstone and Truth are total strangers,’ was Grandpa’s inescapable maxim. Giulia, the night of her eighteenth birthday, had earned the label of
belle dame sans merci
, not least because the suicide was a prince of the lawcourts with a wife and three children.

Until then I had always pretended to know nothing about it, but the talking-to that awaited me was just too much. ‘Aunt, I know about the lawyer in Venice, a man who—’

‘Was it Giulia who told you?’

‘Not a word. But I have heard certain things…Do you think I don’t see what happens when she walks down the village street? And then, when I was in Venice it was on everyone’s lips.’

‘Don’t tell me that my son…that your father talked about it with your mother in front of
you
!’ said Grandma, in her voice a trace of venom.