Authors: Andrea Molesini
Renato turned and looked at him. ‘I have the feeling your innkeeper must have been thinking of Franz Joseph, not Karl.’
Giulia laid her hand on Renato’s arm, and he turned his eyes back to the road ahead and snapped the whip in the air. I felt a stab of jealousy, but I wouldn’t have admitted it even under torture. I looked at Grandpa, who smiled and half-closed his eyes, then looked straight up at the sky, and leant closer, his mouth reeking of wine pressed close to my ear: ‘
C’est la vie
, laddie.’
The morning air was icy. ‘That baron…There’s something childish about him, and I don’t trust the naïve,’ my aunt spoke in an undertone. ‘We need to watch out for him. The Englishman has been noticed…He always flies over twice…and always just above treetop level. And then that kingfisher of his is all anybody talks about, he’s the one who has it in for the observation balloons…Major von Feilitzsch is no fool.’
‘Hanging is interesting,’ said Grandpa, who was walking between me and her. ‘To die kicking without making any noise, a firing squad is just too…too boom! That’s it. A hangman’s knot is slow, a faint creak, discreet and lethal.’
‘Stop trying to be a poet, Grandpa.’
‘Lower your voice,’ said my aunt, pointing to the soldiers who were grooming their mules.
Grandpa linked arms with us: ‘Come, come,’ he said, quickening his pace, ‘let’s go to the inn, at this time of day they serve piping hot coffee, and we’ll have a chance to sense what’s in the air.’
‘Let’s hope the coffee isn’t some kind of grappa extract,’ said my aunt.
‘Yes, and that they’re not serving goat milk,’ I added.
We walked into a funk of sweat and alcohol. The innkeeper was sleepy. The non-commissioned officers were all on their feet, chattering loudly over their large steaming mugs. The innkeeper’s mother was from Naples so the man knew how to make a good cup of coffee. He pointed us to a table. My aunt didn’t seem displeased at being the only woman in the place and I had the impression that, as she took a seat with studied gracefulness, she might have hiked up her skirt just enough to allow a glimpse of calf, contented at the subdued stir she sent across the room.
The innkeeper ran his filthy rag over the table. ‘What can I bring you?’
Grandpa, who seemed more of a sage when seated, looked the sweaty little man up and down – the man had grown a Hapsburg-style set of whiskers – with the expression of a good housewife spotting a cockroach on a clean pillowcase. My aunt came to his aid: ‘Three cups of coffee with hot milk, and no grappa, if you please.’
‘Madame, we’re fresh out of grappa,’ he said, using the dialect term
sgnappa
. The innkeeper twirled his moustache with all ten fingers: ‘These Krauts drink up everything in the house and pay with tin money.’
The coffee with milk was dark, steaming, and delicious. The
cups were sparkling clean. For a moment, as I sipped it, I felt sure that this, not the taste of Giulia’s lips, was the flavour of happiness. A furious whirl of canine barking rushed in: I immediately recognized Dog. The fire had just been stirred back into flame, and Grandpa stood up to hold out his hands over the heat. Adriano came in behind the dog, and slipped and fell, legs in air, to the laughter of the big mustachioed men.
‘So you’re all better,’ I said, lifting him by one arm. He was skinny, and there was hunger in his eyes. He nodded his head up and down, and he reached around for Dog with hands that trembled slightly. I took him to our table and my aunt ordered some hot milk, a bowl of polenta, and a dish of
sopressa
salami. Adriano had set Dog on his lap. The poor animal’s coat was thick with scabs of mange, and one ear had been broken by a swung stick, or some other trick of fate.
‘And how is your Mamma?’ asked my aunt.
The child pulled his mouth away from the polenta. ‘She died two days ago.’ There was no emotion in his voice. He downed the milk in a long gulp and then went on eating. Dog was eating too. Adriano stuffed nearly all the
sopressa
into his pocket: ‘For tomorrow.’ The fear of hunger was stronger in him than hunger itself. There was something at once candid and cruel in his tight little face, a snarl that came from deep within. As he chewed, he stared at my aunt with a look of love, and my aunt returned the glance with eyes veiled with sweetness: ‘Adriano, that’s your name, isn’t it? Come see us at the Villa whenever you like, our Teresa…’ And here she broke off, because a gigantic sergeant was glaring in our direction. He came towards us without needing to elbow his way through the crowd. His chest served as the prow of an icebreaker. He lowered his face, all whiskers and sideburns, to the child’s head. He stank like a sow.
‘I’m thinking I’m recognizing you!’ he said, practically bellowing. ‘You thief! You stealing my dagger!’
Adriano vanished just as fast as his dog.
The sergeant made no attempt to go after them. He shot us a grim look which he followed up by showing a rake’s worth of dirt-coloured teeth. Then he went back to the bar, leaving his stench behind to keep us company.
‘When this war is over, the world will belong to people like him,’ said my aunt. ‘Our earls, our dukes, our gentlemen, and all their
vons
…so many hulks drifting with the tide; they don’t have – they won’t have any strength left to throw into the battle.’ She paused, looked at Grandpa, then looked at me with a hint of melancholy: ‘We no longer have tears or smiles, all we want is to rest,’ she sighed, and caressed my face with the back of her hand. ‘It will be them, the sergeants, who will run all this misery that our fine manners only serve to offend.’
Grandpa looked down into his empty mug. ‘Yes, we’re sailing ships surrounded by steamers, no two ways about it.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘And after the time of the sergeants, you’ll see, then will come the time of the corporals of the day.’
The sound of engines emptied the inn. We went outside too, leaving a couple of old lire on the table.
Three Fokkers, flying at low altitude, were pursuing a Caproni plane with Savoy insignia. They’d gone overhead less than ten metres over the roof. On their wings were the black crosses of the Teutonic Order. The tail of our aircraft was spewing smoke. The Fokkers were machine-gunning the Caproni from all directions. The bomber headed straight for the river in desperate flight. I managed to see that the upper wing was shredded at the centre, directly above the pilot, while the machine gunner was keeled over to one side, no longer firing.
I clutched at Grandpa’s arm: ‘Do you think he’ll make it?’
There was a burst of flame, perhaps the fighter planes had centred the fuel tank. Black smoke rose from behind a hill, to the west. The little knot of sergeants and corporals joined in a round of cheers –’Hurrah! Hurrah!’ – and immediately the inn sucked them back into its fumes, amid laughter and backslapping.
We walked back to the Villa with downcast eyes.
I thought of the two men burnt alive, hoping to myself that they’d died on impact. I watched the Fokkers fly off towards Sacile, by now at high altitude, three small crosses motionless up in the sky. Not a cloud in sight. The sky was pale blue, lightly etched by the wrinkle of a flock of birds flying parallel to the horizon, the first migratory birds of the season.
An aircraft in flames, the shooting of a nightingale, the killing of a horse: we talked of nothing else all through lunch. The image of death is all the more terrible if what dies is something noble and beautiful, something that flies, that sings, that gallops. My aunt told us that she’d talked about this with the baron. She told us that the Germans see death as a blue-eyed smooth-skinned lad, smelling faintly of soap. Whereas we Italians think of it as a woman, young and nicely dressed.
‘Because they think of death as “
der
Tod”, while for us death is “
la
Morte”,’ Grandpa brusquely dismissed the topic, impatient as always when someone other than him was doing the philosophizing.
Teresa had made a roast that aroused the suspicion, something that happened with increasing frequency, that it might be cat meat; I thought it was delicious, but my aunt got up and said to the cook: ‘Come with me!’ I stood up and started to follow, intending to eavesdrop, but Grandma stopped me short.
‘She’s going to tell her that roast cat isn’t fit for us to eat,’ said Grandpa, ‘but it won’t be long before we’ll be licking our fingers at the thought of a roast of that description.’
The room was filled with smoke. The chimney hadn’t been scoured for months now. The rout of Caporetto had taken with it a great many professions and their absence could be noticed in many small details of life. My aunt started to cough, which was greeted with a polite smiles by the baron and General Bolzano, who was making his first entrance into the Villa.
The general was a powerful-looking man, with pale eyes and a clear voice. He was practically bald, he wore grey suede gloves. Inside him too there seemed to be something grey, something that slid out of his eyes and filled anyone who looked at him with sadness. And his eyes were everywhere. He immediately caught my interest. He reserved a long glance for my aunt and me, sensing our embarrassment, understanding the unease of being guests of the enemy in the home of one’s own people, and he knew – oh yes, how he knew – that this outrage would not be lasting. When he lifted my aunt’s hand to his lips, it was not merely his head that curved over it: ‘Madame, I pray that you will believe that my gratitude for your patience is dictated by more than the mere obligations of courtesy.’
‘Your words, General, really touch me,’ said my aunt to the amazement of one and all, ‘because you, like me, live in a world that no longer exists.’ She pulled back her hand and flashed him a broad smile.
The general took a step back, stiffened, and clicked his heels. Looking her in the eyes, he nodded.
We were served by the attendants of the general and the major. Our palates had been seduced by Teresa’s stew, which
charmed even the walls and the chairs. By now, there were no longer any dogs, cats, or rabbits to be seen in the area, and even mules, horses, and rodents had become infrequent sights: no one was surprised any more.
Bolzano praised the cook’s skills, saying that the dish reminded him of his childhood in Vienna at the home of his grandparents. ‘We had a Friulian cook, from Talmassons, and her
spezzatino
was unrivalled.’ He smiled, eyes wide open, as he stared at his empty bowl: ‘Until today, of course.’ There wasn’t enough of the stew for second helpings, but we consoled ourselves with a second round of polenta, which was sprinkled, in the absence of butter, with Riva olive oil, compliments of the general.
The baron’s attendant was a long asparagus of a man, closer in terms of the expression on his face to the vegetable than to
homo sapiens
; the general’s attendant, on the other hand, was pear-shaped, and in his docile gaze it was possible to detect something of that fruit’s sweetness. The pair of them worked in concert, with exquisite savoir faire: a viola and a cello in a Mozart quartet. They knew what the officers and Donna Maria wanted before they were asked, and they took care of me as well. The pear-man filled the glasses. The asparagus wobbled without ever rattling the silverware on the plates as he removed them. Their gestures, their neatly pressed uniforms, were eloquent expressions of the desire to rescue at least a memory of the courteous old way of life from the hurricane of mud and death that was sweeping away nations and families.
‘If our love of good manners were ever to fade, what would separate us from the behaviour of brigands?’ the baron asked point-blank. ‘It’s easy for the knights of the air…Pilots kill gracefully, the sky separates them.’ With one hand he designed a figure of eight over his plate: ‘Eagles against falcons, falcons against
sparrows, but men who dig in the mud live with the stench of corpses…they see the ravaged corpses of friends and enemies mixed together in the gravel and grit and turn into dirt; how do we foot soldiers remain men?’ He looked at my aunt and raised his glass; the Marzemino glittered in the candlelight: ‘It’s just lucky that we still have the ladies.’
I don’t know why I did what I did next. But I could feel something stirring within me all the way down to the pit of my stomach and, as if the portrait of my great-grandmother as a girl, behind me, had come to life in order to speak through me, I leapt to my feet and said, in a harsh voice: ‘Enemies remain enemies even at the dinner table. Even though you have fine manners, there are weapons backing you up, weapons that kill Italians, and that’s something I’ll never forget.’ There was a rage deep inside me, and I have no idea where it came from. My aunt stared at me, uneasily, and the general seemed to have turned to stone. At that point I clicked my heels and nodded my head in the officers’ direction.
‘Sit down, Paolo!’ said my aunt.
The skin on my face was afire. I ran out of the room and right at the door ran headlong into the pear-man who was coming back with the coffee. The tray clattered to the floor in a cacophony of hot sprays.
I breathed in the chilly air. The moon was out, a slender arc floating above the trees. I’d never noticed before that day that the moon, in our sky, is always upright, warlike. Without thinking about it, with the blood pounding in my temples, I went towards the hayloft, towards Renato’s quarters. The
barchessa
was illuminated with a warm and uncertain light, and among the mules, three soldiers were throwing dice, seated on a dismantled engine. They looked up. I heard them laugh as I went by. Then
I saw Loretta emerging from the steward’s quarters with her hands clapped over her face.
The following morning, at the first light of day, the biplanes of Brian’s squadron flew over the roofs of the town and an avalanche of tricoloured pamphlets plugged up the downspouts and gutters of Refrontolo, obliging a company of Uhlans, expected at Moriago, to break march formation in order to act as street sweepers, thus protecting the illiterate minds of the Venetian peasants from the propaganda of the Triple Entente.
The Third Paramour had been invited to lunch and Grandpa looked like an angry owl. He wandered through the Villa declaiming, with Garibaldi’s autobiography open in his left hand and his right forefinger pointed straight up at the ceiling stuccoes, where apes and tortoise, on the shores of a pale green pond, displayed their indifference to human suffering.