Authors: Andrea Molesini
Twenty-Five
A
USTRIANS
, H
UNGARIANS
, B
OSNIANS
, C
ZECHS OR
P
OLES
, whatever they were they hurled themselves on the polenta. ‘Take a good look at them,’ said Renato. ‘The four of them together don’t weigh two hundred kilos.’ The innkeeper stood over them, stroking his moustache and musing. Even he had got thinner. We passed them by, slowing our pace a little. It seemed to me I could hear their jaws chewing at the dry polenta.
‘You see, Paolo, battles are won or lost by armies, but wars are another matter. Wars are fought by whole nations, which means banks, industries, cows, grain, petrol. Things that take time to get together, and you have to make them last for years, not weeks, do you see? These soldiers here are as brave and disciplined as ours, no more, no less, but if Austria doesn’t give them enough to eat…’
‘Will it be long until they make their offensive?’
Major Manca knocked out the bowl of his pipe against a tree trunk. Then, walking on with the empty pipe between his teeth, he said in a low voice, ‘Yesterday I saw eleven railway wagons on a siding at the Pieve station. Flour! Tell your grandmother this. The reconnaissance planes won’t see them because they are camouflaged with foliage. A massive bombing is needed, and at once! That flour is worth ten times more than an ammunition dump.’
We parted. I went to take the message to Grandma, who set to work to put it into code. She didn’t take long about it. Aunt Maria said this must be the last time: ‘Too risky to go on.’
Grandma objected. ‘The washing line…well, we know, lots of people are doing it. But the shutters…’ She had a streak of caprice in her, a consequence of that haughty character which had caused us to stay put on the east bank of the river. Moreover, the code was her brainchild.
Grandpa, on the other hand, was confident. ‘I know it doesn’t take much for them to hang Italians, and in war there’s no sending for a lawyer. But our baron is a devotee of good manners, and good manners can be counted on. They get under the skin far more than certain frivolities such as love or faith.’ With a slight smile on his lips he shot me a conspiratorial glance. ‘That major isn’t going to shoot anyone…The fighting doesn’t depend on what happens at Villa Spada.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ said Aunt Maria grimly.
May is also the month of the Madonna and of First Communions. I was conscripted. ‘Family duty.’ The glass in the church windows had been replaced by tarred cardboard – an Italian bomb had sent them into smithereens. The children all in white were chattering away in the front row while their mothers, great black praying mantises, mumbled incantatory prayers in the row behind. Don Lorenzo had banished the tribe of grandfathers, who were dozing off with their ballast of grappa, to either side of the high altar. The fathers, though, had been borne off by the war, or were toiling with the scythe. Also present were several prisoners of war in working clothes, and a few Austrian officers in battledress. My family was drawn up in the back row, so as not to attract attention. Aunt Maria sat between Grandma and
the Third Paramour, and Teresa and Loretta were there as well. Grandpa’s absence certainly came as no surprise to our parish priest.
The mass didn’t take long. The Sernaglia sector was on the alert, and from one moment to the next the church might be requisitioned for use as an army hospital. But this early warning had been going on for days, and no one – except for Don Lorenzo – was taking it very seriously. After the reading from the Gospel, our priest launched into an invective against humanity at war. He spiced it up with a few insults directed at the occupying troops, whom he then praised for their ‘devotion to the Queen of Heaven’, indicating the blue and white plaster waitress endlessly smiling in the light of the flickering candles. Playing it both ways, I thought, remembering Grandpa once saying, ‘They’ve been doing this for two thousand years. War annihilates families and nations, but God’s collecting bag is always there.’
Coming to the end of his insults and eulogies, Don Lorenzo aimed a finger at the painted vault.
‘Brethren,’ said he, raising his voice a little, ‘when a cow has a calf all Our Lord’s creation rejoices. The flies have a new rump to call their home, the peasant will have milk and meat, the wolf hopes to make a meal of it, no one is sad. No lament arises from the earth. But at the birth of a man, the finest creature in all Creation, we do not know whether to be happy or sad, because God has given man the freedom to do evil. The viper that bites us, the weasel that steals chickens, the wasp that stings…these are not wicked creatures. They live according to their lights, even if they are bothersome. But Eve ate the apple because she believed in the serpent instead of in God.’ His forefinger circled above his head before stiffening into a flagpole indicating the blue of the vault with its well-worn apparatus of symbols. ‘I have
always known that there above,’ he went on, without lowering his finger or relaxing the strained rigidity of his arm, ‘there is the force which moves the sun and the other stars, but the trouble is that this force also causes bad things that we do not understand, not even if we think about it for a hundred years. In fact, those who think about it too much understand it even less than those who spend all day re-soling shoes, Don Lorenzo’s word upon it!’ The forefinger was now lowered, and struck the lectern with a slight thump. The sermon was over and mass moved swiftly ahead until the altar boy’s bell tinkled to announce the elevation. It was then that the big guns were heard. Sudden and loud. Far and near.
‘They’re firing from the Montello,’ said Aunt Maria. The phalange of mantises broke ranks.
‘If they’re firing hundred-pounders they’ll knock us cock-eyed,’ said Teresa, and maybe her saying that aroused Madame Misfortune, for with a crash and a splatter we were all smothered in white powder and plaster.
Don Lorenzo put down the chalice. ‘Dearly beloved brethren, stay calm! This is the House of God…Outside, all of us… but calmly. This way, quick, children first.
Ite
,
missa est
. Hurry along!’ And with his hand he bestowed on the dust cloud a hasty yet expansive sign of the cross. The din the children made as they rushed out vied with the roar of the artillery. Mothers, grandfathers, prisoners and soldiers stampeded from all sides. The priest’s housekeeper had thrown open the side door, and we scattered into the street, passing beneath the bell tower. The sound of gunfire slackened off, and shortly fell silent. Everyone was coughing. Me too, as I joined Aunt Maria in giving an arm to Grandma, for the Third Paramour had vanished, making good use of his big feet.
All that had fallen was a metre of the cornice, but it had whitened quite a stretch of roadway. We were white from head to foot, and in such manner we entered the Villa gates.
The salute from the sentries – the rifle butts thudding on the ground – sounded unintentionally comic: soldiers saluting ghosts.
That evening I spent with Giulia. I went over to her place just as soon as I had had a bit of a wash in the tub in the loft.
The Third Paramour’s shutters were open. He had not yet washed, and was sitting there in an old armchair, white with plaster and fright. Maybe he didn’t even see me, because he neither smiled nor waved. He was staring wide-eyed at the window, his long cigarette holder in his mouth. The cigarette was out. I climbed two at a time to the balcony and knocked.
Giulia opened the door, saw me and burst out laughing, ‘Doesn’t one wash when one calls on a lady?’
‘But I
have
wash—’ and didn’t have time to finish. Her lips forced my mouth open and her tongue was warm and hard. Without letting go of me she steered me to the sofa and threw me down on it. We undressed quickly and then, slowly, made love.
The only woman I had come near to ‘knowing’ was one in the Casino di Siora la Bella, a high-class brothel in the middle of Treviso, where I had been dragged by Grandpa. I was fourteen when I lost my parents, and as soon as I turned sixteen Grandpa decided that my erotic education was up to him. It all happened unbeknownst to Grandma and Aunt Maria who, though they might have guessed something, were careful to keep it to themselves. Thus it was that on 12 August 1916, my sixteenth birthday, I found myself in a piazza in Treviso, a town which
the hazards of war had not yet transformed into a fortress. We put up in a hotel which had huge windows of vaguely Gothic character giving onto an alleyway scarcely wider than a village street. We had a glass of strong liquor at the bar downstairs before going on to the brothel. Grandpa prepared me for the event with homilies slightly less sententious than usual, worked up to it gradually, said that there were certain things a man had to learn early and well, and that certain women knew how to teach, and he concluded with a piece of advice: ‘Remember that even a prostitute must be treated as a lady, because this is expected of you…and in any case she deserves as much.’
So it was that my first contact with female flesh was the large pink bosom of a little dark-eyed blonde who greeted me with the words, ‘Hello there, my name’s Graziella, let’s go and arse around, you handsome fella.’ I imagine she said the same to everyone, even drooling septuagenarians, because she liked the rhyme. But what I never confessed to Grandpa was that with Graziella I had not gone through with it, out of bashfulness, I think, or maybe because that unassuming girl was shrewd enough to realize that for me that was not the moment. And when she took me back to the parlour where Grandpa Gugliemo was awaiting me, in the company of a newspaper, cigar and whisky, she told him I had behaved like a man and a gentleman; and what’s more she said it in a firm voice, giving nothing away.
That evening Giulia taught me that even a woman who has you fall in love with her has something of the Graziella in her, and it is as such that you must treat her, with virility and passion, but keeping something back for yourself. I thus managed not to tell her what I felt for her. When I got dressed I felt proud of having remained myself, and for the first time since I had met
her I felt sure that she too had felt something for me. Maybe she might betray me, maybe she might humiliate me, but some part of her, for an indefinable moment, had been truly mine. And that was enough.
‘Where are you going? There’s the curfew. Don’t go out till dawn.’
I regarded her stretched on the sofa in front of the blazing wood fire. She returned my look with those strange eyes of hers. Her breasts were bare and the nipples still hard and red. ‘I have to go,’ I said, and out I went. My footsteps echoed on the planks of the balcony.
The Third Paramour’s shutters were still wide open. He was motionless in the depths of his armchair, his spent cigarette at the tip of that ridiculously long holder. Two hours had passed and he still hadn’t even rinsed himself off. He was white from head to toe and didn’t even notice me passing his window.
Grandpa never spoke at random when he put on his nightcap, a rite he performed with all the grace of a fine lady. His night-shirt was rather short, not even reaching his knee, and the cap at a rakish angle gave him a touch of melancholy gaiety, like a clown putting on make-up. That night, in the dark, Grandpa and I talked for a long time. We spoke of the enemy soldiers who were more optimistic than their officers, and agreed that this was an unusual thing. ‘The echoes of Caporetto are still in the air, so those bastards still think they’re going to win.’ Then we talked about Renato.
‘I’ve never liked that man, he’s overbearing. There’s real arrogance in that man. You see? He’s even pinched your woman.’
‘No! That’s not so!’
‘Look here, laddie, there’s only one thing a woman won’t
forgive, and that’s teetering. Get into her pants, that’s the only way to keep ’em happy.’
‘’Night, Grandpa,’ I replied. And, glad we were in the dark, smiled to myself.
Twenty-Six
T
HE BATTLE COMMENCED AT THREE IN THE MORNING ON
15 June, beneath a moonless, starless sky. Fog erased houses and hillsides from view. For twenty days in unbroken succession, the coming and going of soldiers had sorely tested the Villa’s resources. Hot sunshine and still air only reinforced the stench wafting up out of the latrines. Unfailingly, Grandpa proffered one of his maxims: ‘Soldiers may come and soldiers may go, but the shit stays here with us.’
And as the sloshing filth spilled over, the church was being transformed into a field hospital. Don Lorenzo had taken to saying mass outdoors, in the meadow between the portico of the
barchessa
and the Villa, something that turned into more and more of an irritant because his sermons were preached in an increasingly loud voice that verged on a shout, while the summer heat made us reluctant to close the windows. Still, even amidst the vast upheaval, some good had come of the situation: the Kraut field kitchen finally had something to cook, including a bit of meat now and then, and a fraction of that something would end up in Teresa’s cookpot, in small part due to the baron’s benevolence, and in large part because of the glittering gold in the occasional pound sovereign that Grandma, through Renato’s hands, managed to drop tinkling into the pockets of the quartermaster sergeant, who had little to envy, sitting
comfortably in God’s lap as he was in those days.
The cannon on both banks of the river fired incessantly. Luckily the Italians, on that first day of fighting, unleashed only their small- and medium-calibre artillery, and Refrontolo remained out of range. The baron had been too busy to pay any mind to the minor matter of the escadrille that flew overhead every sixth or seventh day. My aunt said that he’d changed profession: ‘Now he’s a town constable, always out there in the square directing traffic.’
By late afternoon the church was already packed to the rafters with wounded men; they put the less serious cases out in the stables, with the mules. Austrians, Hungarians, Bosnians, Czechs, Poles, Montenegrins; there were even a first few Italian prisoners. Looking out the window I saw the endless line of wagons waiting to unload bloody infantrymen, who were then stretchered away in all directions. More than once, that day, I saw men without legs, without hands, their head reduced to little more than a clotted bundle of bandages. And more than once I was forced to summon all my strength to keep from throwing up. The dogfights overhead no longer made us look up. Fighter planes with Savoy insignia were constantly strafing the roads, and two of those planes were shot down. From the cockpit of one they extracted a blackened trunk that reeked of charred steak from fifteen metres away. ‘Dear God, let it end,’ I said over and over under my breath.