The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (18 page)

‘We can save him the climb. His traps are empty. I already checked them,' his brother said with unveiled satisfaction. He held up the carcass of the cony. ‘He can sniff on this if he likes. It'll be the closest he'll get to red meat tonight.'

Lucio said nothing, but the nearer they came to the yellow light, the more they realised it did not swing to the stride of a walker. It glowed static in the night, and gradually other lights began to appear around it. They smelled a fire and roasting meat, and soon became aware of a camp in the meadow. They could hear the clang of pots and utensils, the odd cadence of foreign voices, and intermittent laughter, boisterous and bold.

They descended the track from Collelungo, mesmerised by what they saw — uncertain, thrilled and indignant at once, as if they had come across a herd of wild stallions among the campo's mules. They stood in the shadow of the washhouse, watching the silhouettes of soldiers pass between their tents. Lucio strained to see their faces. Some were ruddy and plump-cheeked, no more manly than his own; others had pale skin and hair the colour of maize in the firelight.

He thought of his father and Urso smoking or playing scopa about a campfire in some unknown place. In his mind, their faces changed, replaced by those of Vittorio and Corbellino, Bocca and Rampichino, all the wide-eyed, glossy-skinned village boys he'd grown up with, telling jokes and playing morra and laughing in their Fascist Youth uniforms. The one face he could not see among them was his own.

The donkey snorted and sidestepped, and Viviana, who had been sitting patiently on Lucio's foot, got up and began to pace, sniffing the air. He pulled on Vittorio's sleeve and began to lead the donkey away, up Via del Soccorso. But his brother was slow to follow, reluctant to drag his gaze from the camp. When he finally did, he brooded the rest of the way home.

‘Fagiolo said the Germans would come,' Lucio offered, wondering if he should have shared the information sooner. ‘There's been a troop camped in Monteferro for a fortnight. I heard him telling Professore Centini.'

‘So what?' his brother replied. ‘They're only passing through. Even the bastard circus doesn't think Montelupini's worth the stop.' It was the sort of thing Nonno Raimondi would have said. But Vittorio's voice cracked, lacking conviction, and Lucio thought it wasn't the first time his brother — or his grandfather, for that matter — had sworn something they didn't believe.

As he undressed that night, Lucio asked Vittorio a question. ‘What do you think they want here? The Germans?' But his brother wasn't listening. He was like this sometimes when he hunted: blinkered, unswerving, almost feverish with it. He wouldn't settle until he had what he wanted. But this time, Lucio didn't want to imagine what that might be.

Signora Mazzocchi steadied herself against the counter of the butcher's shop. Lucio had come in early to bring Fabrizia the pelt of the cony and some of its meat, and now found himself trapped there, the hatch blocked by Padre Ruggiero's housekeeper. She was red-faced and breathless, tripping over her words.

‘Yes … that's what I saw, I tell you … right in the meadow by the Fontana Nuova … their intimates strung up like flags for all to see!'

Fabrizia glanced at Lucio and brought her attention back to cleaving the bones before her. They both knew Signora Mazzocchi must have trotted down from Padre Ruggiero's villa at the first glimmer of dawn, so she could be in the thick of the news as it spread through the village.

‘It's indecent … improper. They're supposed to be the German army, not a bunch of gypsies … Is that rabbit there, signora?' she asked Fabrizia, as if to justify her presence in the shop, even though she clearly had no intention of buying meat that morning. Not that there was much on offer: Fabrizia's supply these days had been reduced to scrawny poultry, the underfed pigs and goats of villagers desperate for cash to buy basic provisions: oil, salt, more flour or maize to tide them over until the harvest. Spring was always the hungriest month in the mountains. Lucio brought her whatever they could spare from Viviana's quarry and she sold it in the shop, allowing them all a little cash to keep them in staples.

‘I've already spoken to Professore Centini about it, of course — great bumbling oaf that he is. He says his hands are tied.' She exhaled peevishly, puffing out her lips and reminding Lucio even more of a mule. The constant simmer of her opinion seemed to bubble up and overflow with a hiss, like milk boiling on a stove. ‘Let's hope Aldo Onorati comes home soon,' Signora Mazzocchi said, glancing pointedly over her shoulder at Lucio's mother, who had just passed the window and entered the shop. ‘Centini is lost without him. Aldo would never have allowed Germans to camp right where our women wash their clothes. It's asking for trouble … How fresh is that spinosa at the back?'

Lucio knew his mother was used to the minor insults of the village women — talking of her business without addressing her, as if her condition made her deaf or mute, or plain stupid. But sometimes he suspected they did this for another reason altogether: they couldn't bear to look her in the face, to fall under her unflinching gaze, for fear of being exposed to her opinions, which they knew to be dangerous, or, worse still, might reveal the pettiness of their own.

‘I hardly think so, Signora Mazzocchi,' his mother said. But she faced the window to the piazza, impatient to be gone.

‘Hardly think what, pardon me?' the housekeeper replied, feigning surprise at being addressed. ‘Do you mean your husband would not have managed these Germans better?'

‘No,' she answered. ‘I hardly think it's improper they should be camped there.'

‘Oh?' Signora Mazzocchi flushed, seeming reluctant to be drawn into an exchange.

‘Are we not in bed with the Germans now?' his mother said. ‘They're going to be seeing our underwear at some point, don't you think?'

Lucio heard snickering from behind the counter. Fabrizia opened her mouth and took a deep breath in a half-hearted attempt to stop herself. ‘How is your son, Signora Mazzocchi?' she said, her voice unnaturally smooth, solicitous. ‘Has Angelo received his papers yet?' She picked up her cleaver, and the muscles in her forearms, round and solid as ham hocks, twitched.

Signora Mazzocchi stiffened. ‘No. Well, I'll think about that spinosa. Good morning, signore.' She hurried out and the beaded curtain at the door clacked in her wake. Fabrizia's stomach made the butcher's block shudder as she laughed.

‘How is it you know the exact thing to shut La Mula up?' his mother asked.

‘The shop feeds me all the latest ammunition.' Fabrizia wiped her knife. ‘Ah, she makes me sick with her
Il Duce
this and 
our men
that, and all the while her son's dodging the call. He's been seventeen for the last three years. You know she's packed him off to family in Siracusa? Underneath it all she's hedging her bets that Mussolini won't last the spring. But the cheek of the woman, wishing Aldo home, like he could simply hop on a boat.'

His mother hummed a vague reply, her washing basket creaking on her hip. Lucio stepped through the hatch to the other side of the counter. Fabrizia stopped what she was doing and looked between him and his mother. ‘So it's true, then? You 
have
heard something.' They didn't answer.

Every time a letter arrived from his father, Lucio felt guilty for it, for not missing him in the way that Fabrizia missed Urso, and he saw the same guilt mirrored in his mother's face. The letters had come regularly, at first — from Valmontone, then Naples, and later Tripoli. He noticed the way his mother read the thin pages, the way her eyes jumped over the words, as if searching for something she knew she wouldn't find there. She would leave the sheets in the middle of the kitchen table, perhaps hoping he and Vittorio might read something in them that she could not. But after a while, even Vittorio stopped talking about their father's desert postings, the day-to-day lives of the soldiers, the early successes of the conflict. As the campaign in North Africa began to falter — the facts relayed by Fagiolo's wireless, which picked up Radio Londra — they barely spoke of the letters, of their gradual tapering off and then their complete absence.

When they finally received news that his father had been captured in Bardia, it shocked Lucio less than the ease with which their lives continued in the face of it. The next day dawned just like the one before, and the one before that. They still had their work to do, the hours longer and harder, especially as his mother refused to let them leave school, making them catch up on their chores at first light and well beyond dusk. Yet the months and the seasons trickled on, like the streams in the valley that always found their course somehow, regardless of the dams and diversions the village children built across them. When he thought of his father now, he was but a presence below the surface, a ripple in a moving current where a boulder or log had toppled and sunk.

And so it seemed unfair that they, rather than Fabrizia, received the first news after nearly five months of waiting.

‘You might as well tell me. I know you got a letter yesterday. Pettegola has already announced it.'

His mother dropped the basket on the floor and sighed. ‘Poor Orazio,' she said. ‘Pettegola might have saved him the trouble of riding twenty kilometres uphill.'

Orazio Sposi, the postman who rode from Monteferro on his bicycle once a week, rarely arrived before the contents of his letters. His wife, Giga Sposi, as postmistress of Monteferro, had access to one of the only telephones in the mountains, allowing her to call Professore Centini's wife at the town hall and appraise her of news well before Signor Sposi had even finished affixing his bicycle clip at the gate. The war had led Signora Sposi to see a certain national duty in her prying, and in recent years it was said the postmistress had cultivated a surgical hand with a steaming kettle and knife. Disseminating updates from the front and screening letters for anti-Fascist plots, she liked to suggest, were a contribution to the war effort. Everyone else, of course, saw her for what she was: a gossip, a pettegola.

‘Is she right then? Has Aldo been sent to England?' Fabrizia set down her knife and rested her fists on the chopping board, clenching them until her knuckles turned white.

His mother nodded. ‘He's been shipped from the camp in South Africa to Liverpool.'

Fabrizia crossed herself. ‘Thank Santa Lucia. He's safe, at least.'

‘They've put him to work on a farm, in the south somewhere … here, read it yourself. There isn't much. I suppose they're not allowed to say a lot.'

She laid the flimsy letter on the counter. Lucio stepped towards the door and Fabrizia's eyes fell on him, swimming with worry and hope — searching for something of Urso, anything. He shook his head at her, the slightest of movements, almost nothing at all. But she caught it. Her hand closed over the letter and the colour drained from her cheeks.

‘Keep it,' his mother said to her friend. ‘Read it later when you're alone.' She picked up her basket and headed for the door.

‘Leti?' Fabrizia called, following them. ‘Those Germans. They say they have money and food to trade for wine and grappa.' She cleared her throat, forcing herself to become the businesswoman again. ‘They might be good for more than spying on our
intimates
.'

His mother smiled, and nodded her farewell. As he left, Lucio felt Fabrizia press something into his palm. Outside, he sat on the lip of the fountain and watched the new spring sunlight playing on the water. The slice of smoked meat was tough and dry, but it didn't matter. He chewed on it and tried to remember the last time he had tasted guanciale. Not since before the war, not since Urso had folded up a slice and thrust it in his mouth.

That afternoon he found his mother in the cellar, among the dwindling bottles of Raimondi Gold. They could count them now within a few minutes. His grandfather's chestnut barrels were empty. He and Vittorio had searched every cave and derelict stable between the Vigna Alba and Collelungo, halfway to Montemezzo, but they could not find where he had hidden his still and vats. So even if they could have muddled together a recipe, they lacked the equipment to make the grappa. Instead they traded their vinacce with a maker in Morolo, but Lucio could tell that the resulting grappa was nothing at all like Raimondi Gold. They sold it to a tavern on the other side of Monteferro and kept the Osteria Nettuno supplied from their original stores of Gold.

That first harvest after Nonno Raimondi had gone, his mother had sworn them all to secrecy, including Fagiolo. ‘If Padre Ruggiero finds out we no longer know the recipe, he'll give the Vigna Alba to another family — the Ronzoni or the Ippoliti, someone he thinks can work it better now Aldo is gone. I know it.' She had searched Fagiolo's face a little desperately. ‘Please, Michele.'

‘You just have to ask,' Fagiolo said. She had taken his hand and pressed it in her own. ‘You always knew, Rondinella, you only ever had to ask.' Lucio hadn't heard the name before. He always thought his mother had never been given a nickname. It was the supreme insult of the Montelupinese — to be so far below notice to deserve one, a ghost in one's own town. But this name caught something of the truth of her, he thought, something beyond her illness, her difference.
Rondinella
. She
was
like a swallow, quick and sleek and restless. But Lucio never heard the name mentioned again.