Lambrusco (24 page)

I gave him a little nod by way of thanking him for his consideration.

“Once, several years ago, when the Fascists weren't fully devils yet, just apprentices at it,” he said, “I went to Aldo's, to the yard. I'd been visiting my mother's family near Bellaria. They had a small hotel there, bombed now. I welcome the pleasure, Signora Fantini, to tell you that the windows were open, on a fine spring evening, and I heard you sing—”

He was cut off abruptly. The truck gave a jolt.

Someone cried, “Keep going! Adriano! Keep going!”

“Cardella, you're crazy. Adriano, stop! We have to cut them down!”

“No, no, no, keep going!”

“Stop! I know them! All three of them! The partisans from Bologna! The ones my wife gave rice to last week!”

“Adriano, go faster! I'm your father, do as I say! Look at those ropes, look at those trees, they're booby-trapped. German booby traps!”

“What is it? What is it? I can't make it out, I want to see!” cried the voice of a boy.

“Shut up! Keep your head down! Shut your eyes! Adriano, faster!”

That rough voice belonged to the man just behind me. Adriano's father. I could feel his breath on my neck. I had tipped back my head, although it hurt to. My eyes were looking up at a pale blue bit of the sky, rectangular like a doorway. The clouds above it, and the wispy layer of fog beneath it, seemed to only be there to make the blue more attractive.

“Blue,” I said to myself.

Far away in the driver's seat, the man called Adriano had not made up his mind. The truck speeded up, slowed down, speeded up, slowed down.

At last it shot forward in a burst; it seemed to have decided on its own to start racing. I was pushed back, along with the farmers, without actually moving, as if a huge wind were blowing against us, with a whistling. The tailgate had been well secured and did not spring open.

Blue was for Mozart.

“I heard you sing, as I was saying,” came the voice of the young farmer. “I don't know what it was. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard. After you had finished, long after, I found myself still there, as if under a spell, and a man came outside to me, a big guy, who looked something like a thug. I thought he'd order me away for trespassing, but he had brought me a plate of spaghetti and a napkin and a fork. He said to me, ‘Here, we had this left over. Don't be alarmed. You're not the first person this ever happened to. She's pretty good, don't you think?' His name was Nizarro, first name Vito, which I remember because I asked him. In his person, he reminded me of a Galimberti. As everyone knows, that family's composed of thugs.”

“They're partisans now,” said a farmer. “I heard two of the boys have German bullets inside them.”

“But all their lives, they've been Fascists,” said another.

“That's only because of youth camp, which brainwashed them, like a million others. I haven't got anything against the Galimbertis. They don't rob farmers.”

“How was the spaghetti fixed?”

“With clams. As many clams as noodles, I swear.”

“Out of the shell or in?”

“In. I had to sit down on the ground to manage it.”

“They didn't give you a glass of wine?”

“I wouldn't have drunk it if they had. I was feeling intoxicated already.”

“What was the sauce?”

“Clam juice, oil. Seasonings, I don't know what. Garlic, a few chopped-up tomatoes, hardly even stewed. Very fancy.”

“It doesn't sound it.”

“That's because you didn't taste it.”

“My wife's sister went to an opera once in Milan,” said a farmer who hadn't said anything yet. His voice was shaky. He seemed to be making the effort to speak the way a man in a fistfight would get back on his feet, reeling and hurting, from having been knocked to the ground. Back in the fight.

“She went to La Scala,” he was saying. “She also had a tour of the premises. She said it was interesting, but everything was moldy and she went home sneezing. It wasn't a famous opera, and no one famous was in it, but she had a good time.”

“I didn't see any booby traps. Where were they?” said a boy.

“Everywhere,” said Adriano's father. “Especially in the branches the ropes were tied to.”

“They didn't have their shoes on,” said another boy. “They might have been dead already, before they were strung.”

“Adriano!” shouted his father. His voice reverberated in my ears. “I know you've got the window down, because you're sick to your stomach when it's not, so answer me!”

There was a moment of stillness while everyone waited for the driver's voice, coming back to us on the wind, the fog, disembodied.

“Adriano!”

“Papa, I heard you! What was the question? How can I answer a question you didn't ask?”

“Never mind! Keep driving!”

The truck had resumed a more regular speed. “You're a good boy, Adriano,” called out his father.

“Stop talking to me! Don't distract me!”

“He's right, Venturoli. Leave him alone,” someone said. “He's got problems enough. Who's going to be the one to convince Marianna that Mussolini's been killed, so she can go ahead and feel all right about having her baby?”

“Probably me,” said Adriano's father.

“What are you talking about?” said an older farmer.

“Oh, you never know what's going on,” said another. “Marianna thought everything would be all right when our fucking Duce went down and the Americans came, but when we heard he was saved by the Nazis, she made a vow to God she'd not deliver. Not until he's down for real, for good, in the ground.”

“Well, she's got a point.”

“Fusi, don't be an imbecile. You've got half a dozen kids. A baby comes out when it wants to.”

“You know, after my wife gave those partisans that rice, they said they were on their way to Folcore.”

“The Americans will probably bomb it tomorrow,” said a farmer from somewhere in the middle.

Their voices went on calmly, as if they were gathered together at someone's barn, taking a break between chores.

“Maybe they'll bomb it tonight, if the fog rolls off after sunset,” said the farmer called Fusi.

“They bomb at night?” said one of the young ones.

“Sure, those planes are like bats.”

“Who knows how to take apart booby traps?”

“Well, all of us.”

“So why didn't we stop, back there?”

“Because they're not the kind of traps you catch a fox with, and we promised Cassaromilia we'd be there before dusk,” said Adriano's father.

“One thing at a time, you mean.”

“Yes. Like always.”

“I'd like to go to an opera myself, one day,” said Fusi. “Not in Milan, but in Ravenna, closer to home.”

“You'd have to lose some inches off your belly first. You'd have to wear the suit you got married in.”

“I think you can rent them. I think there's a shop, closed at the moment, where you can even get a rented handkerchief to put in your pocket.”

“Are we nearly there?” said a boy. “I'm sick of this. Every muscle I own, it's cramped. I'm barely able to breathe back here.”

“A few more miles. When we get there, you'll wish you were back on the road.”

“I doubt it.”

“Wait till we get there, then see for yourself.”

“Signora Fantini?” said another young farmer. “Why don't you tell us about some of the operas you've been to, in theaters here as well as Sicily? We know you're Sicilian. Even hearing of one place would be a pleasure.”

I'd stopped looking up. Not much of the blue was left in all the whiteness. The fog was feeling watery, was tasting salty.

Nizarro. I'd been thinking about Nizarro. Nizarro handing a farmer some dinner, in the darkness, outside the restaurant. Nizarro on Annunziata's bed, creaking. Nizarro, shot. The other Beppi, but bigger. Beppi's other Beppi.

Don't think about Nizarro.

“White,” I said to myself. White was for Verdi.

“Signora Fantini? Are you all right?”

I felt I'd placed myself behind a door, against which someone was knocking, someone who would not go away. What was “all right”? I didn't know what that meant, not anymore.

“Adriano!” called his father. “Don't forget to turn left when you come to the crossroad. Is that smoke in the sky up ahead, or more fog? I can't tell. You can't, either? Here comes the turn! Turn the wheel!”

The truck veered off so sharply, it seemed to be taking the turn on two wheels, like a little trick car in a circus. But it didn't tip over.

“He's showing off,” said Adriano's father. “I hate it when he does that.”

I pictured a drawing Aldo had bought in a shop in Bologna; he'd had it framed. It was Verdi's Lady Macbeth—not the character herself but a print of a mannequin in a costume, with a crown on the head. Where was it now? In a drawer somewhere. Aldo had wanted me to sing the role.

I'd never learned it, not even one song. I couldn't remember why. I must have had a good reason. All that killing. All that blood. Was there blood on the necks of the Bologna partisans hanging from the trees? Did one bleed when one was hanged?

“Signora Fantini? Please speak, because this silence is scaring me, worse than I'm scared already, which I don't mind admitting. Will you speak, please?”

“Nico, leave her alone,” said a farmer softly.

Nico. The one who'd gone out of his way to hear me sing. He'd stood under a spell. He'd sat on the ground, opening clams from the kitchen, twirling spaghetti with one of Aldo's forks. As many clams as noodles. He'd felt intoxicated.

I couldn't ignore him, now that I knew his name. “Don't be afraid,” I said. “By the way, to answer another question, I've never been to an opera.”

“You're fooling with us, am I right?” said the farmer whose wife gave rice to the partisans. I was getting the hang of whose voice belonged to whom.

“I don't fool.”

“Then you might be dodging the question because you feel, I imagine, with all respect, that this is not the time for descriptions of luxuries, seeing as how the theaters are shut, and also considering what was hanging in those trees back there, not to mention what we're headed for,” said the farmer who'd called Fusi an imbecile.

“Opera,” I said, “with all respect to you as well, is a necessity, not a luxury.”

“You might not say so, Signora, if you had to sell a pig, which you had needed to eat, in order to buy a ticket,” said one of the teenagers, and Nico said quickly, “Braccini here is a Communist. But he's really saying that because he only likes American jazz.”

“If communism weren't good for us, the Pope wouldn't be against it,” Braccini shot back. “Lolo, agree with me.”

“I agree,” said the boy called Lolo.

“How can it be you've never seen an opera?” said Nico.

I could feel him staring at me—not judging me, just staring at me, puzzled.

“If you want to know the truth, I have a problem with crowds,” I said.

“Excuse me, but as it happens, you're in one. We're a crowd,” said the farmer called Fusi.

“I don't have a problem with you.”

“It's kind of you to say so.”

“Is it claustrophobia, or is it general nervousness?” said Nico. “I'm not trying to pry. I'm curious.”

“It's both,” I said.

“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” said the farmer whose wife gave rice to the partisans. “Me, I can't go near horses. I see a horse even half a mile away, I break out in a skin rash, I get palpitations, I start sweating cold sweat. Cows, I'm all right with. Mules, oxen, anything, just not horses. My whole life it was like this. It's irrational, but, there it is. By the way, I'm a Communist, too.”

“Communists don't like any kind of music at all,” called out someone near the cab, impatiently, as if he'd been waiting his turn to speak for a very long time. “They've all got tin ears. They only want to talk, talk, talk.”

“Pardon me for changing the subject, which I always do when it's politics,” said a farmer somewhat closer to me. “I'm wondering how that song will go about your son, Signora. I hope the composer is through with it soon. I admire the title with all my heart. ‘Twenty-nine Grenades For Thirty Of My Enemies.'”

“No, no, Toto, it's the other way around with the numbers. The whole point is having an extra one, not being one short. Thirty for twenty-nine.”

“I was making a joke. I was making fun of it for not being realistic.”

“You'd have to expect one's a dud,” said Fusi. “Like with clams. You'd never get thirty cooked clams with every one of them opening the way they should.”

“At the restaurant that night, every clam on my plate was perfect, and there were a lot, as I told you,” said Nico.

“They threw out the bad ones,” said the farmer whose wife gave rice to the partisans, and there was a murmur of agreement.

“Communists like music!” cried Braccini. “Communists don't put partisan necks into ropes off a tree branch! How are we supposed to sleep tonight? You think any of us won't be dreaming about that? About how we left them there? Like they'd think we didn't give a goddamn?” Now he sounded like a little boy, trying to not cry.

“Let's go back and cut them down,” said the boy called Lolo.

“Shut up!” said Adriano's father. “There's Cassaromilia! Adriano! Put your foot on the brake! Slow down!”

The truck came to a stop in the middle of the road and the engine shuddered and went off, with an expulsion of dirty exhaust smoke that made a few of the farmers start coughing, including Braccini, who might have done so to cover up whatever sobbing he'd not been able to hold back. He sounded almost feminine about it, like Verdi's Violetta, stricken with tuberculosis, dying extravagantly, unrealistically, gorgeously.