Authors: Hammond Innes
Clearly our arrival was an event in the village.
We reached a little square with the inevitable fountain in the centre. Here old men sat smoking in the sun and women were doing the washing in the cold mountain water. The first tomato crop had been gathered in and on every ledge and roof and even in the street in front of the houses the red fruit, halved, lay drying in the sun, the pips showing yellow. We stopped and children crowded around the car. They did not speak. They just stared, wide-eyed.
I asked for the village priest, and we were directed across the square to a narrow little street that was barely wide enough for the car. It had once been stepped. But the stones were worn and time and the villagers had filled it with so much dirt that it was possible to use it as a road.
The sound of the old Lancia as it stormed the hill was shatteringly loud. The road was so narrow that we seemed to be thrusting the grey houses and the crowding faces of the villagers back on either side. Children ran behind us, clinging to the bumpers and the spare wheel.
So we reached the very summit of the village. And here, in a little square, was the priest’s house. It was not really a square. It was just that the road widened out where it stopped at a grey stone wall. There were houses on one side. But on the other, a wall topped with drying tomatoes guarded a sheer drop to the valley floor. We stopped the car and found ourselves looking down upon the road by which we had come, all flanked by mountains, towards Rome and the sea.
“Blimey!” said Boyd, as he got out and saw the silent gaping crowd of children, “we might be the Pied Piper like.”
The word “Inglese” was whispered through the clutter of small faces. A ragged urchin with dark eager eyes came up to Boyd and said, “
Sigaretta, Johnnie?
” The old cries burst forth then in a clamour of small voices. “
Cioccolata! Sigaretta! Hey, Johnnie, gomma!
”
“
Silenzio!
”
The babel of voices froze. The door of one of the houses had opened and a dark-haired man with a thin face and deep-socketed eyes stood in the doorway, his hands white against the folds of his black gown.
His dark eyes stared at me unwinking as I told him who I was looking for. Not a muscle of his face moved, but at the name Galliani I had a feeling of tension.
“Galliani!” he said. “Maria Galliani. She worked for Guido Mancini down in the valley. She is dead now.” He said it with a disinterested bluntness that was either callousness or the familiarity with death that is perhaps inevitable in a man of his profession.
“When did she die?” I asked.
“Just over a year ago. It must have been shortly after she came to the village. She had suffered and it was too much for her.”
“And what about the girl?”
“The girl,” he repeated. And I had the impression he was playing for time. Or perhaps it was my imagination. There seemed no vestige of humanity in him. His voice was cold, unhelpful, as though he resented being questioned about a member of his flock.
“The French girl,” I said. “Her name was Monique Dupont.”
“I know of no girl of that name in the village.”
“But surely,” I said, “Signora Galliani brought with her a girl when she came to live in the village. She would have been about twenty.”
He seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “Ah yes, it is possible that she has some French blood. She is fair—not like our mountain people. She was Maria Galliani’s niece. Her name is Monica. Why are you interested?”
I told him then about Monique’s mother in England
and how I had followed the trail of the girl from Naples to Itri and on
to
Pericele.
He said nothing when I had finished. He stood there quite silent for a moment. He might have been praying for guidance. Or he might have been thinking out his line of action. At any rate he suddenly said, “
Scusate
” and disappeared into the house.
W
HEN
the priest came out again he had on his wide-brimmed black hat. His quick scurrying walk, which scattered the children out of his path, made him look like a black beetle hurrying about its urgent affairs. “I will take you to see the grave of Maria Galliani,” he said and bustled into the car. As we moved back down the hill to the village square he said, “Are you a Catholic?”
I shook my head.
His white hands fluttered in an expression of resignation. “I was thinking that you might have liked to give a candle for her. The English are always so generous.” He shot me a quick glance and then sighed. “The little church where she is buried is very poor and much repair work had to be done after the battle by the bridge. But God was merciful. He damaged only His own house and left the village untouched.”
He directed the driver down through the village to the ford and the little church in the valley. We were met at the door by an old man with a grey beard and watery eyes. The priest motioned Boyd and myself inside.
Like everything about the village the church was depressingly primitive. It was cool and almost damp inside and the peeling walls were festooned with tawdry gilt and white plaques to the dead of the village. On the wall opposite the door a life-size figure of Christ hung dejectedly from its cross. It was badly carved in wood and on a shelf at its feet stood jam jars of faded summer flowers.
I don’t think I have ever seen such an ugly interior to a church. The villagers seemed to have vied with one another to hang upon its walls the most gaudy memorials
possible within their means: even to little glass or celophane cases filled with artificial lillies.
The priest had stopped by the door to talk to the old man. But now he came in and led us up to the altar. “These were carved by Maria Galliani,” he said, pointing to a pair of candlesticks delicately worked in some local wood. On the base of each was carved the name of her husband—Emilio Galliani—and the sign of peace.
“In the cemetery you can see her grave,” the priest said, leading us out again into, the bright sunlight. “She had not worked long with Guido Mancini, but he bought her a good headstone.”
By the great marble tomb of the Iori family, half-hidden by two black crosses that marked the graves of German soldiers killed in the fighting at the ford, was a sandstone boulder. On it was roughly carved—“
Hic Jacet Maria Galliani
,
Requiescat in Pace.
” There were wild roses in a little sunken vase.
“And now, what about the girl?” I asked, as he showed no sign of moving.
“The girl? Ah, yes—she is at Mancini’s farm. She is all right. But she will be up in the hills now, minding the goats. It will be difficult to find her.” His eyes watched me out of their dark sockets.
“Then let’s go to the farm and see,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “If you will wait while I have a word with the wife of the man who looks after the church. She has been ill and it would be unkind if I came here and did not visit her.”
I nodded, and he led us back through the cemetery and disappeared into the open doorway of the cottage attached to the church.
“Like a bloody beetle scurryin’ into ’is ’ole, ain’t ’e,” said Boyd. “Somehow I never trusts them blokes. I seen quite a bit of ’em in the little fishing villages along the coast an’ I always ’ad a feeling they was living on the igorance of the people.”
It was nearly ten minutes before the priest reappeared. He got into the car and we drove on down the track,
across the ford and then turned left below the broken arches of the bridge. Beyond the mill the track turned right and ran along the banks of the stream through a cool tunnel of trees. At the end of this track stood Mancini’s farm.
It was a biggish place of grey stone cluttered with outhouses. The farmyard was strewn with dung that steamed in the midday heat. The lazy hum of flies was the only sound when the Lancia’s engine stopped. A small boy came out of the house with a sly sidelong glance. His hands were deep thrust into the pockets of trousers that had once been khaki serge and there was milk on his upper lip which he kept on licking at with quick nervous movements of his tongue.
The priest knocked at the door and a dog barked lazily as though the effort were too much for him in the heat. The flies buzzed incessantly, settling clingingly in the sweat of face and neck. The door with its blistered paint opened suddenly and framed in the darkness of the interior of the house stood a woman of about thirty-five.
She was a big woman with wide hips and breasts that sagged unsupported beneath her black cotton dress. Her hair clung dankly to her head, which was large for a woman, and she wore a pair of big gold earings. Her lips were a thin bitter line in the olive skin of her face and she had the dark brown eyes of a bitch that has been whipped too often to expect any good to come of life. Her belly was big with child and where it stretched her dress the cotton was a deeper black with sweat. Her legs, braced wide apart to support the weight of her, were marked with bites which showed a dull red through dark hair. Her big peasant feet were thrust incongruously into an expensive pair of mules, the finery of which was filmed with dirt and threadbare with constant wear.
“There is an Englishman here to see the Galliani girl,” the priest said.
She spread out her hands in the Italian gesture of
resignation and I saw a great purple bruise on the inside of her left arm. “The girl is in the hills looking after the goats,” she said. She said it flatly, without expression, as though we ought to know that the girl was in the hills looking after the goats.
The priest shrugged his shoulders. “I am sorry,” he said to me. “It is as I told you. She will not be down until the sun sets and to search for her on the hills would not be good in the heat. But at least your journey has not been wasted. You will be able to tell her mother that she is all right and well cared for. When Maria Galliani died she made Guido Mancini the girl’s guardian. He is prosperous, as you see. He will find her a good match and he has agreed to provide her with a
dote
.”
“Who is this woman?” I asked. I did not like the unctuous tones of the priest’s voice nor the way he took it for granted that I would not wait to see the girl.
“This is Signora Mancini.”
I made no comment. I was not impressed by the woman’s appearance. She looked bitter and cowed. The primitive atmosphere of the village seemed to linger here in the flaming heat of the farmyard. I told Boyd to take a look round the outhouses. Somehow I wasn’t quite convinced that the girl really was away in the hills.
“Is there anything else you wish to know about the girl whilst you are here?” the priest asked.
“I’d like to have a word with this man Mancini,” I told him. I was thinking of Mrs. Dupont back in England, struggling against ill health to earn a living at a typewriter, her daughter the only thing she had left to live for. Was it enough to go back and tell her that her daughter was a goat-herd at a farm up in the Abruzzi?
“You are thinking perhaps that it is hard for a girl who has been well brought up to be working on a farm?” suggested the priest with uncanny insight. “But, remember, the girl is not the girl her mother knew. She has seen much poverty. And she is now accustomed to
this life. She has no other home in Italy. And she has assumed Italian nationality.”
That brought my thoughts up with a jolt. It would make it difficult for me to take her out of the country, even if I were willing to assume such a responsibility. “When was she naturalised?” I asked.
“Just after she and her aunt settled here.”
I turned away from the farm. Perhaps it would be best to leave well alone. “I would like to meet Mancini,” I said.
“He is up in the village now,” the priest said. “But by the time we get back he will have completed his business there and then he will go on the rounds of his farm. You may have to wait until this evening if you wish to see him.”
I hesitated. That would make another day. Stuart would be wondering what the hell I was up to. As I tried to make up my mind what to do, Boyd suddenly appeared from behind one of the barns and came hurrying towards us.
“Mr. Cunningham,” he called out excitedly, “you remember that bullock cart we met as we crossed the ford coming into the village this morning?”
I nodded.
“Well, it’s right here in the farm, still full of dung with all the flies in Pericele buzzing round it. But I don’t see no sign of the girl.”
“The girl!”
Good God! Of course—the girl. Fair hair and grey unhappy eyes. And the man who’d struck her—that would have been Mancini. And then I remembered the little boy who had slunk out of the farm as we drove up and the way the woman had said the girl was up in the hills in the flat-toned way people do when they’ve been told to say something that they know to be untrue.
I glanced at the priest. He hadn’t understood what Boyd had said, but he sensed that something was wrong and his dark eyes flickered between us.
I went over to the Lancia. “When we were at the church, did a little boy speak to the old man and then come down to this farm?” I asked the driver.
He nodded. “It was the one who was leaving the farm as we drove up.”
So that was it. I swung round on the priest. “Get into the car,” I said. I was seething with anger.
It was the wrong line. I knew that as soon as I had said it. I should have been more subtle. Now I had frightened him. I saw fear leap like a wounded rabbit into his eyes as they shifted from the car and me and on to Boyd. Then he jumped for the open door of the farm, flapping through the entrance like a great black crow that has had its wings clipped.
Before Boyd or I could move the door had closed. The bolts shot home with a rasping sound and we were left staring at the blistered paintwork.
“Well, of all the bleedin’——” Boyd checked the stream of obscenities that rose unconsciously to his lips. “Wot d’you reck’n his game was anyway?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer that one. But I was determined to find out.
“Here come the chuckers-out,” Boyd said.
A small man with a village-made straw hat on his head had come into the farmyard. He had a shotgun under his arm. The double barrels gleamed bluely in the sun. The driver began talking fast in Italian. It was plain he was getting scared.