Authors: Andrea Molesini
‘I have murdered soldiers to avenge, and an enemy pilot who was given safe harbour, and—’
‘Major, war is murder, always and invariably…all you want is to set an example: killing gentlemen isn’t the same thing as killing peasants! After the battle, the troops’ morale has hit bottom; your high commands fear the uprising of the populace, once the final clash has begun, isn’t that right? Moreover, you’ll have an easier time confiscating the crops if the peasants see their masters dangling from hooks high atop poles. That’s what you think, and that’s what the field marshal thinks, that’s what General Teodorski thinks. But by refusing to show mercy, you contribute…I’m talking to you, Baron von Feilitzsch, because you’re here…You contribute to the destruction of the civilization to which you and I…and this boy…belong, and that civilization is more important than the fate of the Hapsburgs themselves, or
the House of Savoy. You won’t like the world that is coming into existence any more than I will: there will be no room for pity, nor for that gentility of manner that we care…so much about. With your severity you think you’re doing justice, but it’s the other way around, Baron, you’re just blazing a path to a time when a corporal will claim the title of general, and the people will make fun of us, of you…because we’re children of the horse, not of the plane…’ My aunt was a dynamo, and I sat glued to my seat, listening in astonishment. ‘But when our courteous manners are long forgotten, when the superfluous is viewed with contempt and haste rules the world, foolish brutal men will wield the sceptre and therefore, when the universal deluge washes over us, there will be no ark in readiness.’
‘Madame…Madame…’
Donna Maria went to the door and pulled it open. But before she left she turned around with stormy eyes: ‘God damn you to hell, Rudolf von Feilitzsch!’
Forty
T
HEY LOCKED ME UP IN THE SILKWORM HATCHERY, ALL
alone. No delicacies from Teresa: they gave me black bread, dried polenta, and very weak coffee. The smell of sulphur that still impregnated the plaster mixed with the odour of the tobacco that the red-whiskered corporal had given me. It smelt slightly of the stables, but I didn’t really mind. That man had taken a liking to me. ‘You’re a good kid, you know…even if your nose looks a Genoa jib.’ One time he stopped to talk, and he told me that one of his sisters had died, that he hadn’t been able to attend her funeral, that in Vienna these days they’d been eating dogs and smoking straw for months, and that it was just stupid to carry on the war.
The window was tiny, the glass was filthy, and the light that chased away the darkness in the morning was just a strip of dust containing all the colours of the rainbow. Everything had happened as if in a movie, where you can see the images but the reason for what happens remains, at least to a certain extent, unknown. I felt responsible for Lieutenant Muller and for the peasant girl who had slit her throat with my knife. I thought about Giulia, Grandpa, and Renato. I thought about death, and the noose that awaited me. Sometimes I’d stand up, put my face just a few centimetres away from the wall, and breathe slowly. Then the picture of the Austrian I’d killed would surface in my
mind. He’d tried to surrender, he’d tried to say no, with his face, with his eyes, with that raised hand, with the other hand pressed against his wounded belly, but I’d fired anyway, and I’d enjoyed doing it. I told myself that it wasn’t true. But what I remembered was a sense of euphoria, not pity: I’d acted confidently, obeying a will that I had a hard time believing was mine, and the sensation of triumph was there, horrifying. Then I’d throw up, spitting saliva and remnants of undigested food into the bucket we used for our excrement.
I remained there three days until, on the morning of the fourth day, the corporal with a red moustache came to get me, accompanied by a soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. We crossed the courtyard: it was drizzling and there was a good scent of wet grass. I thought about Grandpa, and I decided that certain people are like hundred-year-old oaks. When they’re felled, they leave a hole in the earth, a hole that the seasons struggle to erase. The corporal opened the storeroom door with a key that was a hand’s width long. The soldier shoved me inside and shut the door.
‘I can’t say I’m happy to see you again.’
It was Renato’s voice, followed by Grandpa’s embrace.
In that big room, the harrow and the plough sat rusting. The floor was rammed earth and there was a small high window from which you could see the treetops and a small patch of sky. There was also a pallet made of dry straw, which we managed to make serve as a bed for three, as well as a table, four stools, a pump that spat water only when it felt like it, and a tin pail that served as a chamberpot. There, for years, the demijohns of olive oil and small barrels of vinegar had been stored, and the whitewashed walls gave off a rancid stench that turned the stomach, though I quickly became accustomed to it. The meals, thanks to
our cook and Grandma’s silver coins, were reasonably plentiful and tasty, and Renato was starting to recover. The baron had learnt very little from him, but what little he’d learnt was enough for him to make a good show with his superiors.
Teresa was the angel of victuals, our tie to the outside world. Grandma and my aunt had been permitted only one visit, and they had devoted their time with us to Grandpa’s ankle, which was swollen: when they arrested him, he had resisted, and he had a swollen cheekbone too. The medical officer had stopped by for a minute and a half, and he’d said that what was needed was ice, ice and time, but the icebox was out of order and the time remaining to us little and shrinking.
‘There’s that serpent of a daughter of mine, who’s no longer my daughter,’ Teresa would say each time she set the mess tins down on the table. Until finally one day Renato, tired of hearing her grumble, whispered something in her ear. Teresa glared at him with black thunder in her eyes, then lowered her head and for the first time left the room without a
diambarne de l’ostia
and without asking if there was anything she should report back to the mistresses.
When I told the story of my escape, I said nothing about the death of Lieutenant Muller, I just said that he had managed to get away. Renato understood that I was keeping something from him, but he pretended he hadn’t. He told me that Giulia was a spy too, that she’d been working with him in the I. S., and that my suspicions were foolish. I, in turn, pretended to believe him. Grandpa always looked at me with large, sad eyes. And I never knew what to say to him.
We did what children, ostriches, and savages do: we said nothing about our impending executions, we talked only of the errors made by General Cadorna, the Church, and the Widow’s
Sons; and about the Socialists and the downfall of the Romanovs.
Time passed slowly in prison.
At night, I heard Renato talking to himself, and Grandpa snoring as he’d never snored before. In my dreams – and I dreamt with my eyes wide open as well as when I slept – I saw Giulia, and those few, intense, precise moments of passion came back to me, as I watched and listened to them again. The thought that she wasn’t the woman for me, that I’d never wanted to grow old with her, did nothing to console me, I still loved her, I loved her even though she’d betrayed me.
Certain memories crushed me with their weight: I’d seen the Czech kicking as he dangled from the hook, and the other one shot, and all those men who’d died in the church, all those broken men begging for water, and who knew what they were seeing. And I’d killed, too.
The things I’d miss would be the electric smell in the air after a summer thunderstorm, I thought to myself, the smell of new mown grass, the smell of Teresa’s
spezzatino
, and the smell of Giulia’s hair. From time to time I’d think of how upset Grandma would get because I was a donkey when it came to arithmetic, and how my aunt would take the slightest phrase as a pretext to slip into one of her brown studies.
We took turns sweeping the cell with a sorghum broom, while the major and I shared the duty – from which Grandpa was exempted – of cleaning the tin pail at the pump, a pump that heehawed vigorously but produced very little water.
At first light, the guard brought us a mirror and a razor. Grandpa let Renato shave him, but Renato preferred to do his own shaving. I also managed to take care of my own shaving, even if the mirror was a fragment no bigger than my hand. And when the guard, who watched over the ritual with his rifle at his
foot, confiscated the mirror and the razor, he pretended – he did it every time – to listen to our complaints about the broken pump.
It wasn’t long before I started keeping my ration of grappa for myself instead of giving it to Grandpa. I started to develop a taste for alcohol. I liked that sense of giddy sleepiness, the pleasant illusion of freedom you get from slightly disjointed sentences. Finally, one morning, around seven – we’d just had our coffee – we were driven out of the cell by three bayonets: one poking at each back. I assumed the time had come.
The cool of the night had vanished. And the white sky was turning light blue. We understood that our turn hadn’t yet come when they marched us up to three caskets: the baron wanted to make us witness the funeral of the murdered soldiers. They lined us up, between the latrines and our little cemetery which had only seven headstones of ours, surrounded by thirty or so untidy mounds of dirt.
‘They’re empty,’ said Renato, in an undertone.
‘What?’ I murmured.
‘Those coffins.’
They were made of roughly nailed deal planks, and the infantrymen who carried them weighed less than the boards themselves. They lowered the coffins into the grave one atop the other. The baron put together a brief speech and the platoon snapped to attention. All told, the ceremony couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. They took us back to our cell.
‘How did you know they were empty?’
‘With this heat and without ice, how could you keep three corpses? Freshly unearthed some time ago, to boot.’
‘Have you seen the road?’ asked Grandpa. ‘White, empty, without so much as a barking dog, without a single cat on the
walls. And outside the stables there were three men with carbines at their feet and bayonets.’
‘The soldiers must be starving,’ said Renato.
Grandpa and Renato talked about politics a lot. They did it to stave off the fear of death. At first I found it offensive, because they tended to exclude me from their discussions, but in the end it wound me up and every so often I’d weigh in myself, on one side or the other.
As far as Grandpa was concerned, the king had staged a coup, sidestepping parliament, and had driven us into that bloodbath even though he was well aware that Italy lacked both the military and financial resources to sustain a long war – and even the deaf and the blind knew, back in April and May of 1915, that this was not going to be a lightning war. Renato retorted that the king had had no choice, that Italy relied on France and England for its supplies of raw materials, from wheat to coal, to say nothing of the debt of honour that the country had towards Queen Victoria’s empire.
‘France and Prussia helped us out, but only at two points… there was a common advantage…but you can’t forget that that follower of Mazzini, without the English, would never even have been able to land at Marsala.’
I jumped in: ‘Look out, if you touch Garibaldi, Grandpa’s liable to…’
But that time Grandpa’s counter-attack failed to drive deep, after a moment of hesitation that robbed his offensive of all its impetus, he almost seemed to go over to the enemy’s side: ‘Maybe Italy is a failed ambition…nothing more than a geographical expression…Metternich was right…and the plebiscite that legitimized the annexation of Venice to the newborn Kingdom of Italy was a fraud: who really believes that so few voted against it?’
‘What!’ Grandpa’s outburst had lit up Major Manca’s eyes and unshaven cheeks. ‘A geographical expression…yes, absorbed into the soft belly of the Kingdom of Sardinia, though. Don’t forget that Victor Emmanuel II’ – and here Renato’s pipe went out – ‘never changed his name when he became the King of Italy. He was the Second when he was King of Sardinia and he’s still the Second as King of Italy. Ah, yes’ – and he lifted the lit match to the pipe – ‘we hardly created ourselves with our hands, we were not our own makers, we Italians…well, the Piedmontese…maybe…’
‘A little royal house from the mountains with a big appetite for revenge…but, Major, you say that the English wanted a monarchy that could settle matters with the Roman Catholic Church, and the Masonic Grand Orient supposedly lent a hand…I could admit you’re right, in fact, I do, but you see… history doesn’t work that way, with such well-oiled mechanisms, neat situations…it would be too convenient.’
Renato wasn’t caught off guard in the middle of that no-man’s-land by that offer of a truce: ‘If you want to argue… you need to simplify matters…and a mortal vice-grip clamped down onto the pope at Teano. The pope’s worst nightmare had come true: there was a single king ruling the entire peninsula, and so things turned ugly…from Teano to Porta Pia took just ten years.’ He emitted a nice big puff of smoke into the air between Grandpa’s face and his. ‘If our Teresa were here, she’d say:
Diambarne de l’ostia!
’
The idea of bringing the cook into the discussion, and calling her ‘ours’ had been a masterful move: and so, with a more convincing smile than was customary with him, Grandpa acknowledged that the major certainly knew how to talk. At that point, I caught the ball on the first bounce and sealed the
armistice: ‘The unification of Italy was a whiplash from the war between Protestants and Catholics.’ It wasn’t original with me, but Renato pretended not to know that.
‘Compliments on the concise summary, laddie,’ said Grandpa, and he raised his mess tin to drink a toast. I imitated him while Renato rummaged under his pallet. Concealed in the straw he had half a bottle of cognac, stolen from who knows where by Teresa. We raised our dented goblets towards the stone roof. ‘It’s been centuries,’ I said with a knowing air, ‘since those bastard priests started scheming to keep the north and the south of the boot from joining together.’