Between Enemies (16 page)

‘If you were to say one mass after another without stopping…’ I pulled myself up short. It wasn’t funny.

‘The bell is the voice of the whole village, not just of the church,’ said the priest, folding up the printed sheet.

‘That’s why they’re taking them.’ Renato spoke with a spurt of anger. ‘Take away the voice of the people, the voice that announces their festivals and funerals, the voice that sounds the alarm…it’s like tearing the heart out of them.’

Don Lorenzo got to his feet. ‘No bells, no voices but those of the guns.’

A knock at the door. Renato said, ‘Come in,’ and a blast of cold air brought in Loretta. She was carrying a steaming dish, a slice of pancetta on a thick slab of polenta. ‘I’ve brought you some supper. A nice Kraut boy put it aside for me.’ Then she spotted us and her eyes widened. ‘You here too…’ Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and the priest.

Renato cut the pancetta into three pieces, taking a large knife from a hook on the wall. I made the most of the mouthful by taking a sip of wine. Loretta just stood there, sulking. The priest gave her a look of disgust to match her mother’s
diambarne de l’ostia
.

‘Scrumptious pancetta, this. I wonder who they stole it from,’ I said.

‘From the mayor.’ Loretta’s voice betrayed the poison of rancour. ‘The mayor’s larder was chock-full of every blessed thing, I tell you. All stuff stolen from the labouring folk, poor ducks.’

‘Pancetta…Haven’t had
this
for a while,’ said the priest with his mouth full. His pleasure-loving nature loathed abstractions.
His god was in things themselves, as in that mouthful of pancetta that had put him in a good mood. Renato, though, was troubled. He had something on his mind that wouldn’t let up. However, the pancetta acted on him, and on me, like a healer’s balm. And all of a sudden we began to sing:

And then, with the priest joining in at the top of his lungs, we followed it up with:

I wondered what could be the source of the magic of such sad, disconsolate songs. Maybe in the dark we all feel at one with the river, the woods, the beasts of the field. Maybe we too are there in the mule that catches the scent of death and refuses the bit.

Seventeen

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE WHITE SILK FLAG WAS THE COAT OF
arms of Franz Joseph, the gloomy Apostolic King of Hungary, known to us as Ceccobeppe, topped by the crown of St Stephen. Giulia and I were walking together so close that our elbows brushed as my fingers furtively sought hers while hers kept making their escape. We circled the flagpole. The Austrian banner mesmerized us. ‘With a flag that beautiful,’ said Giulia, taking my hand, ‘they can’t win.’ On the other side, the middle of the white space was occupied by the arms of the Kingdom of Hungary, supported by two angels in flight, the outer one in profile, while the one nearer the flagstaff gave us the same embarrassed look as so many Madonnas who haven’t quite made up their minds how to hold the Babe. The background colours of the shield peeped through a mass of crowns, towers, heraldic beasts, and symbols of the feuds of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia and the grand-duchy of Transylvania, in which the gold of the crown, embellished with red, blue and green inlays, was at odds with the silhouettes of the angels, who seemed eager to wilt into the cloth, harbingers of fading glories.

‘This lavish display of symbols jars with the shoddiness of the present,’ I said.

‘Now you’re starting to talk like your grandfather.’

The blood rushed to my cheeks. I didn’t know what comeback
to make, so I ran on ahead and into the
barchessa
, on my own. A few mules were tied up there, along with a stomach-turning stench of piss and a dozen bicycles leant against the wall. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness. A soldier with a pipe in his mouth was stroking a dog, whispering in its ear as if it were a restive horse. I left. I looked around me. Giulia was no longer there. Two non-commissioned officers were leaning against the boundary wall, smoking their long pipes.

It seemed as if the war had simply gone away. But as I approached the kitchen I heard the noise of crockery being smashed. In the corridor two soldiers with rifles and cartridge belts slung crosswise were rummaging in the dresser, among the pans and dishes. They glanced at me without the slightest interest and made no room for me to pass. I squeezed myself against the wall and entered the kitchen. Teresa was yelling, ‘To hell with you, misbegotten mangel-wurzel mashers! There’ll be no Madonna for you, you’ll be supping with Satan!’ A pile of casseroles, coppers, wooden spoons and pots and pans of every shape and size blocked the area between the hearth and the table. ‘But what’re you after, eh, you scrofulous thimble-riggers?’

I went and stood by her. ‘Just as well they can’t understand you.’

Teresa regarded me with ill-concealed contempt. ‘Don’t know what these pilfering piddlers want. It’s been ten minutes they been messing among my pots, and him with the emperor moustache has said if they don’t find what they want they’ll go and stick their noses upstairs, may his moustaches moulder!’

The sergeant now came up and thrust his chest to within a centimetre or two of mine. He loomed above me by a hands-breadth. ‘You, out!’

I was about to obey when in came Grandpa. ‘What’s all this hullaballoo, Teresa?’

‘They’re just hurling everythin’ to hell here, and won’t even deign to tell me what they’re lookin’ for, the curs!’

‘It here, I know!’ growled Whiskers, glaring at Grandpa with his huge blue eyes.

‘Franzi-fancy Whiskers,’ murmured Grandpa. ‘What are you hunting for? Rather than turn everything upside down, wouldn’t it be better to ask?’

‘You, quiet. We search gun,’ he said, cocking up his thumb and pointing a pretend revolver. ‘You know where is? You say!’ And he smoothed down his moustache, challenging Grandpa’s scowl with his bright blue glower. ‘We know it be here,’ he added, repeating that childish revolver gesture.

‘We are hiding nothing. We have no weapons,’ protested Grandpa mildly.

The sergeant stopped stroking his moustache and his glower darkened. He seized Grandpa by the lapels, and this time Grandpa paled. I had never seen him like that. He was more surprised than frightened. I took a step towards him but Teresa beat me to it. She shouldered the sergeant off and stabbed a finger straight at his nose. Staggered, he took a step backwards.

‘Cowardly scoundrel!’

‘Calm down, calm down, nothing’s the matter, Teresa. Take it easy and let them search for what they want. We have nothing to hide.’ Grandpa straightened his jacket collar. ‘There are no weapons here, Sergeant.’

The search resumed, even more wild and violent. The men now hurled the pans onto the floor with greater rage and fury than ever. It was their way of showing us who was top dog. After the kitchen came the turn of the downstairs rooms, one after
another. I took Grandpa out of doors, into the garden, and we strolled around for a while.

‘Defended by a servant! If this is what this world is coming to, I don’t mind going to another,’ said Grandpa, then clammed up. After half an hour we went up to the attic. The search, with din and devastation, continued far below. Grandma and Aunt Maria had been to protest to the baron, who had stayed immured in his office and hadn’t even received them.

I followed Grandpa to the Thinking Den. We sat and smoked, he an inordinately long Tuscan cigar, I my pipe. On the desk between us towered the black bulk of Beelzebub, reducing the little Buddha to the status of a minor god. Grandpa had an urge to talk, to give an account of himself. Even he, who in one of those aphorisms good for the dinner table had said that men do not do so, and that if they do it is to conceal, not to reveal.

‘I have always been a prisoner,’ he said quietly but clearly, with a tiny pause after each word. ‘Yes, a prisoner, you heard me right.’ He was not even seeing me, but fixing his gaze straight ahead, on the smoke from his cigar. ‘I have never been able to kick the current Kraut in the teeth.’

‘What do you mean, Grandpa?’

‘A man who is really a man soon learns to fend for himself, to cast aside all safety and convenience…He has to learn it early!’ He blew a smoke-ring. ‘I’ve been scared of the truth…When you tell the truth you lose friends, you lose everything. The truth hurts, because it brings you right back down to earth. And that’s what we all try to avoid.’ He still wasn’t seeing me.

‘You mean, back to reality, not dreams.’

For an instant, a bare instant, he saw me there. ‘Defended by a cook…a servant…’ He sighed, as if to get a load off his chest. ‘That woman Teresa is worth more than me, she’s got more guts
than me, she’s of more use to the world than I am.’

‘Her rabbit stew wasn’t bad…in its wartime way.’

‘You know what the trouble is, Paolo? The trouble is that we have the priests sitting on our heads. They’re the ones who school us, and they it is who have least faith of all. They believe in God’s nest egg all right, because it’s useful, but for the rest… Just draperies and incense to dress up all their natter about nothing. What do they know of the fire that burns within us? They don’t see their wives and children die. What do they know of the kingdom of the dead? They fear it and they avoid it, as do we all, but what do they know of it? They believe in the Church, yes that, because their Church has walls and money, but when they turn to their god…They’ve always burnt visionaries alive. If a peasant sees the Madonna they don’t pat him on the back, they put him on trial! But then if other people start to see Madonnas where the peasant they burnt saw his, then they say, “Yes, the Madonna appeared here,” and build a chapel, then a cathedral, a monastery. That’s how it works with them. They think they are lambs among a pack of wolves, but in fact they themselves are the wolves. There is no hellfire, but the truth is a flaming fire, and the truth is our hell. Our cook showed me today that she has more truth to her, more life in her, than I have.’ He looked at me then, and he saw me.

‘She’s a very special woman. I’m fond of her too.’

‘She is a great-hearted woman.’

‘Heart’ was a word Grandpa never ever used.

‘We Italians are the progeny of priests, we detest joy. It scares us. Foreigners say we’re a happy-go-lucky people, but they’re wrong. We clip the wings of happiness as soon as it’s heard in an infant’s cries, because they’re a disturbance. But the world needs disturbing, and how!’ He looked at me, but again without
seeing me. ‘These bars that imprison me I have fashioned little by little over the years, day by day. They are forged out of my fear of disturbing the world.’ He stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray he kept beside Beelzebub. He laced his fingers at the back of his neck, leant back in the creaking chair, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Something resembling an expression of serenity spread across his face, and a smile appeared beneath the moustache he no longer had. He was my old Grandpa again, with the face that laughed even when he was sad.

‘Grandpa, do you remember when you were teaching me geography?’

He roared with laughter. ‘You refused to learn the word “antipodes”.’ His hands described a globe above Beelzebub. ‘Italy and New Zealand,’ he said, pointing his index fingers at each other, but from a distance, to convey the notion of a map of the world. ‘New Zealand and Italy, you couldn’t grasp the idea. And then suddenly you said, “New Zealand is a boot upside down, Grandpa; it’s Italy fallen onto the other side of the ball.” It was a wonderful moment…You’d made me see something I’d had in front of my eyes all the time.’ He laughed again, and added in the grave tones of one of his grand pronouncements: ‘War also is like a child. A child who every so often shows us what we’ve had before our eyes and never seen, because we’re too careless or cowardly.’ He sighed. ‘Two things which, at bottom, are very much alike.’ He fell silent for a while to mark the change of register, then said: ‘How’s it going with Giulia?’

‘Well.’ I was expecting to blush, but I didn’t. With him I felt safe.

‘I’ll see for myself when you’ve been for a good ride on her…You must be ingenious. As I told you, that one is a mare’s crupper!’

Eighteen

I
HAD WOKEN UP WITH A HEADACHE
. ‘W
HAT
I
NEED IS A
good walk,’ I said to Grandpa, who without deigning to glance at me went straight to earth in his Thinking Den. I left the house without breakfasting. I wanted to be alone. It looked like rain. I went as far as the little temple and lit my pipe. I began to feel better, and after a few minutes I set off walking again, doing the round of the park. With the air making my eyes smart and firing up my mind, I thought back over what Grandpa had said. That a man had to learn to fend for himself early in life. I’m too meek, I thought.

I stopped outside the barn. I knocked at the steward’s door but got no answer. On the floor above his quarters the hayloft was divided in two by a thin partition of larch-wood planks; on the left was usually piled the fresher hay, on the right the seasoned stuff, which had all been carried off by the Germans. I climbed the wooden ladder and went and sat in the right-hand part, the empty one, as I didn’t want to get my breeches full of hay. I spread my legs and leant back against the partition. It began to rain. I loved the smells that the first rain reawakens, of wood and grass and soil and dung and leaves: everything revives. But suddenly I was startled by the voices of Loretta and Renato, talking excitedly. I thrust my pipe into my pocket, still burning but with my hand over the mouth of the bowl,
and flattened myself against the partition.

Between the planks there was a gap of a finger’s breadth. She was clambering up the ladder. He was following. ‘If this is what you’re after…But you’ll take me up the bum…I’m not taking any chances, see?’ He didn’t even remove his overcoat, just unbuttoned it. With quick, precise movements worthy of a gunsmith he stripped off her cloak and blouse, revealing her enormous milk-white breasts. He bit them, eliciting a little cry which he stifled by turning her round and pressing her head down in the hay. She spat out bits of hay, while he spat in his hand and took her brutally. Again he stifled a cry from her, pushing her face right into the hay. I saw his heavy boots grazing her ankles, saw the skin reddening. And when she, spluttering out hay and sobs and saliva, managed to moan, it was only to mingle her pleasure with his. Then, for a long moment, I fancied I could hear the woodworms at work in the rafters amid the rain battering at the tiles.