Lambrusco (32 page)

“Maybe she'll enter a convent, Ugo. A cloistered one.”

“This isn't a time to be joking.”

“I wasn't.”

People were watching. Galimbertis, Marcellina, Beppi, partisans poking their heads out of the tents, farmers, a big crowd. Don't let the truth show. Be careful. Talk softly. No kiss goodbye, not even a family-style kiss in his role as cousin-in-law of the widow.

“I will come to you.” A decision, hard. Said in a whisper, but hard. “No one will know, not even Beppi. Everyone on the squad is still mad at him, but it won't last. If he doesn't want to talk about where he's been, that's all right with me. I think we should leave him alone about that. But I'm sure he'll tell his friends. I'm sure he'll be bragging his head off.”

An excision. He felt I'd gone inside him. As simple as that. He would have thought so before if he'd ever looked at me. It shouldn't have taken so long.

As if I were his surgeon. Until the war ends. Was I supposed to hope it never would, to be with him?

Hard inside was Fascist. Harder than bone, harder than rock, harder than shells, harder than metal. That was always their secret. As if their souls had been fossilized.

“Don't become a fossil,” said Ugo. “Do that for me.”

Hold on for now. Think of things.

Things to be like. It wasn't a song, not really. Just another list.

A scallop.

A lobster.

A crab.

A head in a helmet.

Arms in plaster.

Sand in a bucket.

A cushion in a car.

Food in a can.

Winter.

A declaration of love in a war.

“My reward,” I said to myself, about Ugo. “My reward for staying alive.” I couldn't go to hell for loving him because there wasn't a hell to go to, not outside of this world.

Inevitably, I spoke to my husband.

“Aldo, I'm at the Jewel,” I said. “Isn't that a nice name? It's an Italian hotel, but American now. In a way, it seems I got to America after all. America in our country. What do you think of that? Your old dream. It's not how you meant it, but still.”

For a while I talked to him often, avoiding the subject of Ugo. I imagined Aldo in a melodramatic way: sulking, hurt, growling, furious, aligning himself with Eliana. “Aldo, give me some credit. I never betrayed you when you were alive.”

He wouldn't want me to be lonely. He must have been placing his bets on Etto. Were the chairs at home in our kitchen, including his own, made at Etto's factory? What about the table? I couldn't remember. Probably.

“Aldo, a long time ago, I made up a song about Eliana and her basket of herbs. I feel bad about that now. If you want to know if I feel guilty, I do, but only about that. Only that little song. I enjoyed it very much when I composed it, though.”

I couldn't blame Aldo for his soft spot toward Eliana and her rugged ways, her faith in God, her hair coiled up at the back of her head, her quietness, her goodness, her lack of bitterness because things had not worked out the way she wanted, because her womb had let her down, because she couldn't bear a child.

Don't say “child.” Don't say “bear.” It's not the same thing, what they did to her.

“Aldo, everyone says Ugo's the best physician in Italy. Did you know that in the past he performed a certain procedure on some of his women patients? You probably knew that. He probably confided things like that to you.”

Aldo would have hated it here. There wasn't much to be impressed with in this hotel-hospital America. Green, khaki. A land without color. Green and khaki weren't colors. The walls were neuter, a sort of dirty white. The blankets, which had belonged to the hotel, not the army, were light brown. The floor tiles were dirty-white and gray. The bricks of the building next door were the same as dried-up shit.

Annmarie's in-bed attire was white sheets, plaster, pale skin. The bluish tinge of bruises didn't count. Neither did the areas where dressings and bandages were regularly applied. Those weren't colors. They were aberrations.

Some progress was made. It wasn't necessary to despair. She started talking. Whispers, what is happening to me, I don't feel well, why are you fussing with me, why are you making me eat, why are you giving me juice? I don't want it, it hurts, I'm going back to sleep now, leave me alone, go away.

She only spoke English in her sleep. Dream murmurings. Nightmare murmurings. Awake, she spoke Italian. She knew where she was. That was something.

“Go with her,” the American had said, unexpectedly.

Enrico. Mr. Intelligence Officer. Mr. Intelligence Officer,
sir.
The soldiers who'd turned up at the Galimbertis' with the ambulance had called him sir. He had touched me on the shoulder, like a comrade.

An offer. A deal. “Stay with her. I know you care about her. She can trust you. I know you brokered guns for that squad of yours, which you can't do any longer, since even the black market's not functioning. I'll give them all the guns they want. You're not required in that particular department. I beg you. It's not as if I'm asking you to cancel singing engagements. You see how it is. Things are not looking good for her. We're worried about internal injuries, besides the one I already told you about. I have access to many resources. Let's make a deal. Tell me what you want.”

Tom Tully. It felt better to think of him with his American name.

So sure of himself. Everything held inside, in check. A volcano not erupting. Maybe he'd learned to be that way in America, at the golf club. Maybe his officer's training had only refined it. Would she ever play golf again? Win more championships? Throw more punches at cheaters? Would she? Would she? Would she?

“Tell me what I can do,” he said, looking at me directly, unblinkingly. “I'll arrange anything you want, to express my gratitude to you. It's a lot I'm asking for. Leave your son, your squad. Or tell me how to pay this debt, if that's how you want to think of it.”

“Let me remind you, the debt is mine to pay. To her.”

“All the same, tell me what you want.”

I didn't have to look for Beppi anymore. That didn't need to be the thing. “Find Mussolini and get rid of him” didn't need to be it, either. Someone was probably already going about that. “Fill my plate at every meal, and put everything you blew up back together again” was what a child would have said. “Make Eliana leave Ugo, as if God had instructed her to do so” was not a possibility. “Cure the chicken girl's deafness before she has my grandchildren, just to make sure” could not be it, either. “Make me want to sing” was out of the question. How could he take the silence out of my head?

“Exterminate my restaurant,” I said. “When that's been accomplished, exterminate my house.”

He knew what I meant. “That's a big order. There's an awfully big infestation. It might take a while.”

“I've got a while.”

“You're a courageous woman. It's an honor to know you.”

“I'm tired. I'm empty. I'm falling apart. I'm in pieces. I feel I'm inside a shell, which may be smashed apart at any moment.”

“You're mistaken. Cowards don't have shells.”

Then a handshake, firm, hard. He thought I was
brave
?

Maybe I could pretend, like Aldo saying there was money in our bank account when there wasn't. Bluff like Aldo! Remember how, when the first
trattoria
was getting by just fine, he'd got those plans for a new one, twice its size, into his head. And then a huge leap of faith, and much more bluffing, from the second
trattoria
to the restaurant. A restaurant with as many seats as a midsize theater. For me.

Always, graciousness. I hadn't lost that.

I was able to put up a good show for the doctors, all American, coming and going, mostly incomprehensibly. The arms, set. Plaster from top to bottom, including the wrists, right up to the knuckles, both hands. A terrible paleness in the fingers and thumbs.

Worry about circulation, among other things. The blood was not flowing well, not only in the arms. The legs, too. Like a plumbing problem. We're fixing that. We're trying and we won't give up.

Gestures. A lot can be said without words. Weary military doctors, needing baths, not getting them. Keep her still.

“Aldo?”

Sometimes when I closed my eyes to picture him, all I saw was just that, a picture, like a photo of him I'd happened upon, faded and crumpled, at the bottom of a box.

“Aldo, Beppi wouldn't come right out and tell me where he was. Oh, sooner or later, he will, but he's mad at me for figuring it out. Did you think, before, I was crazy to tell myself he was in that chicken house? Granted, I was wrong about my feeling that they were holding him there against his will. I admit that.”

It began to happen that when I tried to remember the sound of Aldo's voice, it wasn't there. It was like coming to the end of a record, with the phonograph needle scratching and scratching on a soundless disc.

Then at last, his silence felt like something normal. An empty record, going around and around. I was thankful for that.

The ordinary, necessary silence of the dead.

And then a suitcase. Brought in by a young American soldier in
khaki.
He hadn't spoken. He'd only made gestures to let me know I was the one it was meant for.

The suitcase contained three wool skirts—a brown one, a gray one, and a black-and-brown plaid. And four blouses, all white, and underwear, including a bra that was exactly my size; four pairs of wool stockings, all gray; a thickly knitted brown cardigan sweater, and two vests, one gray, one tan. Everything fit. They were definitely not Italian clothes.

On my feet, the boots.

Soon I was picking up more English. New phrases. One of them was
vee-eye-pee,
which was written in three letters of the alphabet, V, I, P.

There'd been a woman soldier who sat for a while at the side of the bed, looking at Annmarie. No, not just a soldier—some kind of counselor. Wanting to have a discussion. She was about Annmarie's age. She patted the plaster arm casts as if the skin beneath could feel it.

Unlike all the Americans in this place, that woman soldier knew a bit of Italian.
“Non bene. Molto non bene.”
A smile for me, a hopeful look. She wanted so much to talk. Probably no one had told her that the patient was being kept sedated. Soon would come the medical procedure.

VIP. She'd squatted down to the floor, writing the letters in the talcum powder a nurse had spilled—an unfamiliar nurse, very young, new to war. It had been time for fresh dressings and a bed bath, which had not immediately happened. She dropped everything she'd carried in, poor girl. All dry things, though. Powder, lotion, fresh bandages, a hairbrush, a sponge. When she picked up those fallen things, her hands had been badly shaking. I had already pulled back the bedsheet, had already removed last night's wrappings, and thus had exposed the whole of Annmarie's body.

Maybe in American nursing schools they didn't prepare girls for this sort of thing. Or maybe there wasn't a chart, filled out in detail, to be looked at ahead of time. The hospital was a busy place, packed, understaffed. Or maybe American nurses were only instructed about injuries to men. An educational insight. Women get hurt in war, too.

Really look.

That long, long body, white, soft and hard, still an athlete's. The bed was just long enough so that her feet didn't dangle off the end. The breasts had been beaten, the belly, the thighs, the shoulders. The areas requiring dressings were those where the skin had been compromised, had been transformed to sores, near the hips, at the top and the side of one breast, and just above one knee. They weren't burns. They were lashings.

Both knees were badly swollen. One knee was no longer like a knee at all: just a strangely smooth thing without bones, somewhat octopus-like; the similarity was striking. In the first week, they came and took her to surgery. Surgery, not procedure. Two different things.

Now there were scars on both sides of that knee where stitches had been. It still looked as if it belonged deep down in the sea, but the size was considerably smaller. At the ankles, there were more sores, but those had already started scabbing.

No damage had been done to the other side of her. Just the front. Just.

There weren't bedsores, and there weren't going to be. She was turned to one side or the other as part of the daily regimen. A tricky thing with the arm casts, but manageable.

Bedpans, cleanings. Massaging the fingers. It was always good to rub lotion on the back, the buttocks, the backs of the legs, unhurt.

Her hair had grown longer. It was easier to brush it, now that the head bruises had healed, but sometimes there were tangles, which needed to be undone carefully. Little burr-like knots would form at the back of her head from a particular version of nighttime tossing and turning.

In the next bed, I was awakened not only by the regular mutterings of Annmarie's English sleep talk but also by a humming-like moaning. I'd look over and see her turning her head on the pillow from side to side, side to side, side to side. And up and down, up and down, up and down.

Sometimes it only took a minute or so to make the motions cease: my hands on either side of Annmarie's face, palms flat. Sometimes it took a lot longer.

“Beppi had nightmares all his childhood,” I told her. “I never knew what he saw in those dreams, because he never remembered. But with you, I know. You're imagining yourself on your golf course, aren't you, Annamaria? In the American desert? In your exhibitions? In your colorful clothes?”

As if turning her head from side to side was saying “no” to a bad shot, and up and down was saying “yes” to a good one.

The talcum powder was American, not masculine, not military: a scent of something vaguely flowery. Annmarie liked to have it patted on her back and her face, places it didn't hurt to be patted. And sprinkled inside the casts. It must have reminded her of home, of something familiar.